The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (22 page)

Thucydides’ account of the war ends the same year and his verdict belies the Athenians’ resolve. Although their fleet numbered barely a hundred ships and the Spartans had invaded Attica and again confined them within the long walls, they resumed campaigning in the Aegean in 411
BCE
. The Athenians sought to protect the Black Sea grain ships, receive tribute from members of the
Delian League, and engage the Peloponnesian fleet. Stretched to the limit, they kept the Spartans and their allies on the defensive, but the odds were against them. By 405
BCE
, the Athenian fleet was crewed by “
all men of military age, slave or free,” and a Spartan admiral promised that he would “
put a stop to your fornication with the sea. She belongs to me.” The following year, the Athenians and Spartans met for the last time in the confines of the
Hellespont where in the course of a few hours Athens lost her navy, and with it control of the strait, the grain trade, and her empire. Faced with starvation, the Athenians accepted Spartan peace terms: their navy was reduced to twelve ships, they were forced to join the Spartan-led
Peloponnesian League, and the Spartans imposed an oligarchic form of government.

Peace proved elusive and in the early fourth century
BCE
, Sparta and Persia were frequently at war, with Athens and other Greek cities often siding with the Persians. Amid this tumult, the Athenians recovered from their humiliating defeat in the Peloponnesian Wars and in the 370s
BCE
they concluded a number of alliances that in many respects revived their fifth-century empire. Protecting markets and sources of supply remained foremost of their aims. The Black Sea grain trade was the most important and heavily regulated, but fourth-century documents reveal a robust and diverse commerce. Of particular significance was the development of the bottomry loan—“
the only form of genuinely productive investment known at the time”—in which a merchant pledged his ships, or its cargo, or both, in exchange for a loan payable at the conclusion of a voyage. Interest rates were variable, but generally high—as
much as 22.5 percent in one instance—and they were subject to tight restrictions: loans to shippers resident at Athens could only be made for grain cargoes bound for that city. Such protectionist measures were not unique to Athens. Wine from
Thasos could be exported only in Thasian ships, and although Athenian coinage was the most widespread in the
Greek world, the Black Sea port of
Olbia refused to honor any currency but its own.

The busiest Greek port of the fourth century
BCE
remained Piraeus, where building had been vigorous after the
Persian Wars. Laid out in the previous century by a Milesian architect named
Hippodamus, whose rectilinear street schemes were widely imitated, Piraeus was divided into a naval port, a market, and a residential area and had three distinct harbors:
Kantharos on the west side of the peninsula, and
Zea and Munichia to the east. In 331
BCE
, Piraeus had sheds for 372 triremes, and the ships’ equipment was stored in the
Arsenal of Philon, which measured 120 by 16.5 meters and stood 8 meters high. Kantharos was the site of the grain market and the general trading area where merchants brought samples of their wares, the bulk of which remained in their ships until they were sold. The entrance to Kantharos was guarded by two artificial quays between the ends of which was strung a chain that could be raised to the surface to keep raiders out, a typical form of harbor defense down to the twentieth century.
Aristophanes’ comedy
The Acharnians
captures the vitality of the harbor, its whiff of sea wrack and odors of goods and ships, the percussion of heavy cargoes, oars, and rigging all in movement, and the accompanying chorus of human voices: “
shouting crows around ships’ captains, pay being distributed, figureheads of
Athena being gilded, the Piraeus corn market groaning as rations were measured out, people buying leathers and rowlock thongs and jars, or garlic and olives and nets of onions, garlands and anchovies and flute girls and black eyes; and down at the docks, the sound of planing spars for oars, hammering in dowels, boring oar-holes, of reed-pipes and pan-pipes and boatswains and warblings.” Though not unique, this brief portrait of the Piraeus waterfront is among the most sensuous and densely populated from the hand of an ancient writer.

Despite their dependence on ships and their crews for everything from their daily bread and defense to their extraordinary wealth, the Athenians and most of their contemporaries disparaged merchant mariners and their world. It is difficult to appreciate the hostility that sailors faced in Classical Greece. Starting in the late sixth century
BCE
, the Athenians’ increased reliance on sailors, shipbuilders, shipowners, and investors fostered an increasingly heterogeneous and cosmopolitan society, a natural and potentially revolutionary consequence of expanded maritime trade throughout history. Despite the crucial importance of commerce, neither sailors nor merchants—most of whom were
foreigners—were held in high regard. While the battle of Salamis ensured the Persians’ withdrawal from Greece, it also brought the tensions between merchant-sailors and the landed aristocracy into high relief. For the latter, the acme of Greek resistance to the Persians was not Salamis but Marathon. Despite his having fought in the naval battles at Artemisium and Salamis, and written about the latter in
The Persians,
Aeschylus wanted to be remembered solely for his part in the
battle of Marathon. But Salamis helped validate the notion of democracy in Athens (where the last tyranny had been overthrown only thirty years before), because the defense of the city involved citizens of humble birth, and not just contingents of wealthier hoplite soldiers. The role of the former became permanent in the fifth century
BCE
as Athens nurtured an ever-expanding empire bound to the home city by its merchant and naval fleets. Not surprisingly, when the Peloponnesian War ended, aristocrats blamed Athens’s defeat on its democratic political system.

In the fourth century
BCE
,
Plato and
Aristotle were among the most virulent critics of the “
naval mob” unleashed by
Themistocles. Plato argued that death was preferable to adopting the ways of sailors and “
their plausible and ready excuses for throwing down their arms and betaking themselves to ‘flight without dishonor,’ as it is called. Phrases like this are the normal consequences of employing men-at-arms on shipboard, and what they call for is not infinite commendation, but the very reverse.” He also recommended that to avoid the corruption that inevitably arises from sea trade a city should be situated at least eighty stades (fifteen kilometers) from the sea. Aristotle was hardly more generous, allowing that “
There can be no doubt that the possession of a moderate naval force is advantageous to a city,” but insisting that “The population of the state need not be much increased, since there is no necessity that the sailors should be citizens.” Given such disdain, it is hardly surprising that only two shipowners of Classical Greece are known to have owned more than one ship,
Phormio and
Lampis, “
the largest shipowner in Hellas.”

Biases against mariners and merchants were by no means limited to the Greeks, and
Herodotus noted, “
I have observed that
Thracians,
Scythians, Persians,
Lydians—indeed, almost all foreigners—reckon craftsmen [including traders] and their descendants as lower in the social scale than people who have no connexion with manual work.” Despite their conspicuous and measurable contributions, seafarers remained suspect and marginalized in many societies, even as merchants and others both relied upon and profited from their labor, not just in the Greek world but elsewhere. There were of course exceptions, and conspicuously absent from the list of “almost all foreigners” are the
Phoenicians and Carthaginians, whose embrace of maritime commerce can be seen in their commercial diaspora and the fact that the most important of the three gods they recognized,
Melqart, was a patron of trade and overseas colonies. Largely unaffected by the Greeks’ incessant wars, by the start of the fourth century
BCE
Carthage was among the Mediterranean’s strongest powers, and territorially the most extensive. Stranger still, the greatest challenge to its maritime preeminence would come not from Greece, but from a most unlikely quarter, the
republic of Rome, which would make the sea its own.

Despite a shared history, language, and religion, the city-states of Greece were too fractious to remain at peace with each other for long. Two centuries of almost uninterrupted warfare had left them exhausted and power in the Greek heartland ebbed following the meteoric rise of Macedonia’s Alexander the Great. His premature death in 323
BCE
left the eastern Mediterranean in the hands of powerful warlords who carved huge states from the corpse of the Persian Empire. At the same time, maritime-oriented states in the central Mediterranean were tilting the balance of power away from the east.
Phoenician Carthage controlled much of the trade of the western Mediterranean, while the Greek cities of southern Italy kept a watchful eye on each other, Carthage, and the rising power of Rome. The latter emerged as the dominant city of the
Latin League by the end of the fifth century
BCE
, but the Romans did not take to the seas until the
First
Punic War (264–241
BCE
). For the next five centuries Rome’s growth and prosperity was inextricably tied to its control of the Mediterranean sea-lanes.

The ascendancy of republican Rome would have been impossible without its citizens’ willingness to use the sea for war and trade. So long as they were ignorant of seafaring, the Romans were a threat only to their immediate neighbors on the Italian Peninsula. As they adapted their military abilities to naval warfare they became indomitable. Cultivating their own sea power and that of their allies, they were able to extend their rule to
Ionia; to have a say in the foreign affairs of Syria,
Palestine, and Egypt long before they formally annexed these countries; to move their armies; and to feed their citizens from the rich granaries of Sicily and Africa. By the start of the common era, Rome was a Mediterranean and Black Sea empire. Although the next few centuries
are known as the
Pax Romana, the Roman peace, it would be more accurate to call the period the
Pax Mediterraneana,
for it was only here, on what the Romans called
Mare Nostrum,
“our sea,” that they were undisputed masters.

The triumph of Thebes over Sparta in 371
BCE
heralded a shift in the center of political power from southern to northern Greece. A dozen years later, Philip II came to the throne in
Macedonia, whose people contemporary Greeks regarded as barbarians, and in 357
BCE
he precipitated a decade-long war with Athens by seizing the port of Amphipolis. After taking Byzantium and defeating Athens and Thebes, Philip formed the
League of Corinth and committed the Greeks to war with Persia. Assassinated before he could embark on this venture, he was succeeded by his son Alexander in 337
BCE
. In a decade of military campaigns, the young Alexander the Great trailed a thin veneer of Greek military might and culture across a large swath of Southwest Asia as far as the Indus River. His strategy reveals his strong sense of the uses and limitations of naval power. Although the Persians had more than three times as many ships, Alexander seized the ports of Ionia to deny them the ability to operate in the Aegean and threaten his rear in either Asia or Greece. In accordance with his interpretation of a prediction that he would “
overcome the ships from dry land,” he captured
Miletus from the landward side while 160 ships blockaded the harbor. Marching east, Alexander defeated
Darius at the
battle of Issus and turned south toward Egypt, besieging Tyre for six months en route. Egypt offered little resistance and after being enthroned as pharaoh at
Memphis, Alexander sailed down a western branch of the Nile until he “
went ashore where the city of Alexandria, named after him, is now situated. It struck him that the position was admirable for founding a city there and that it would prosper.”

The establishment of Alexandria must count as the most beneficial and enduring of its namesake’s achievements. Laid out by the engineer
Deinocrates, the city is situated on a bay enclosed by the island of
Pharos, to which it was connected by a man-made mole that created a double harbor. To the east lay the protected anchorage of the Portus Magnus of Roman antiquity, the primary port for overseas shipping. To the west was the larger but more exposed Eunostos (literally “good yield,” and the god of grain mills), which was the primary outlet for goods from the interior, especially grain, which reached Alexandria via a canal leading from
Lake Mareotis to the south. The island of Pharos later gave its name to a 140-meter-high lighthouse designed
around 280
BCE
by the engineer
Sostratus. Said to have been visible for thirty-five miles, the Pharos was considered one of the wonders of the ancient world. As well as a major port, Alexandria was the capital of
Egypt, a major seat of learning, and home to one of the greatest libraries
in antiquity. After Egypt’s annexation by Rome in 31
BCE
, it continued to flourish because of the state-sponsored grain trade, which continued until the seventh century ce. Although many of its ancient structures have been submerged or pillaged, Alexandria remains a leading Mediterranean seaport and a lasting testament to Alexander’s strategic appreciation of the sea.

The
Macedonian’s subsequent campaigns across
Mesopotamia and Persia were bound to the land until he reached the Indus, where he built a fleet to transport his army to the Indian Ocean. There he divided his forces, part of which returned to the Persian Gulf by sea while he led a smaller group overland to Mesopotamia. When Alexander died at Babylon in 323
BCE
at the age of thirty-two, he had no designated successor, and it was not until the start of the third century that the principal centers of power, each ruled by one of Alexander’s generals or their descendants, were more or less fixed. Chief among these were Egypt, ruled by the Ptolemies from 304 to 30
BCE
, Mesopotamia and Persia by the
Seleucids (304–64
BCE
), and Asia Minor and the Levant by the
Antigonids (279–168
BCE
).