The seventh century BCE witnessed an upsurge in the mercantile activity and general prosperity of the Greek world. Corinth led the way in both maritime connections and the development of the naval power that accompanied it. Probably by the middle of the century, Corinthian shipbuilders had worked out the main features of a galley that the sources call a trieres, or “three-fitted,” and that historians today refer to as a trireme. Though not widely adopted by Greek (and other) navies until around 500 BCE, it then dominated naval warfare for 200 years.
Arrangement of Rowers in a Trireme
This drawing illustrates the tiered and staggered arrangement of rowers in a trireme. The top tier rowed through an outrigger, and the bottom two tiers through ports in the hull itself. Making such an arrangement work required group training and individual skill.
The arrangement of oars and rowers in a trireme was for a long time a matter of much controversy among historians, some of which continues with regard to the larger ratings—four- and five-and even larger fitteds—that superceded the trireme in the Hellenistic period. But careful reexamination of all the evidence, the development of new evidence from naval archaeology, and, above all, the modern reconstruction of a trireme (see the Issues box on p. 86 for more on the controversy and new forms of evidence) have largely settled the issue of how a trireme was designed. The “three” in a three-fitted refers to a group of three rowers, each with his own oar, arranged in three tiers. What kept the ship from having to be built up too high was that the second tier was fully over the lowest tier (Aristophanes jokes about them farting in the faces of the first tier), but the third tier was only about half again higher than the second; all three tiers were staggered, and the third tier also sat somewhat outboard of the second and rowed through an outrigger overhanging the hull. The second tier rowed through the gunwale, and the first through portholes in the hull close enough to the waterline that they were sealed with leather bags wrapped around the oars.
This arrangement allowed 170 rowers to be fit into a hull barely longer than that of a single-tiered pentekonter—Athenian triremes measured about 120 feet long and 19 feet wide—but with much more rowing power. The reconstructed trireme could sprint at eight knots and cruise for hours at four knots, with half the rowers taking turns, and it could turn fully around in the equivalent of two-and-a-half boat lengths. With a small crew, officers, and fourteen marines, the standard contingent of an Athenian trireme was 200 men. A central gangway connected decks on each side; the gap between the gangway and the decks could be covered with hides to fully enclose and protect the rowers, making a cataphract (covered, or armored) trireme, though most Athenian triremes were left open, or aphract. The trireme was thus fast, maneuverable, and far more powerful than anything afloat at the time.
Given that manpower was the most expensive element in maintaining a war fleet, however, nearly quadrupling the number of men aboard the standard warship raised the economic and administrative stakes of naval power considerably. Many smaller city-states slipped out of the ranks of naval powers, leaving the field to the biggest and richest (or to alliances) of Greek city-states and to the Phoenician and Greek cities of Asia Minor that fell under the rule of the Persian Empire, which had come to dominate the eastern Mediterranean world by 500 (see Chapter 2). It was in this context that Athens rose to naval prominence.
Athens had had a war fleet in the sixth century, mostly made up of pentekonters; from midcentury, it had also included some triremes. But Athens was not a major naval power; despite its size, it looked to land domination of Attica and relied on its hoplite phalanx (see Chapter 3) as its main weapon of war. But Themistocles persuaded his fellow citizens in around 493 to expand and fortify the Piraeus, Athens’ port, and build up its navy, initially against Aegina, a Greek rival with whom Athens was at war. In the next decade, the long walls that connected Athens to the port were built, and, in 483, the state launched a major trireme- building program, funded by income from new silver mines. Themistocles proved far-sighted, for the fleet of nearly 200 triremes Athens took to war with Persia under Themistocles’ leadership in 480 saved the city and Greece from Persian domination.
The Persian War
Naval power was crucial to Xerxes’ invasion of Greece in 480. His army crossed the Hellespont on a bridge of triremes and pentekonters tied together, and the navy escorted the supply ships vital to sustaining his army in Greece. The confederation of Greek states opposing him assembled a combined fleet nominally under Spartan leadership but in which the Athenian contingent and the strategic and tactical advice of Themistocles dominated. The Greek forces checked the Persians at Artemesium but retreated to the island of Salamis off the Attic mainland when they learned that the land defense at Thermopylae had been defeated.
At Salamis, the fleet first evacuated the population of Athens to the island, save for a few who interpreted literally an oracle that said Athens would be saved by its “wooden walls”. They barricaded themselves in the Acropolis behind a wooden wall, only to perish when the Persians sacked the city and stormed the citadel. Meanwhile, Themistocles worked to persuade the allied contingents of the fleet to make a stand in the Salamis straits and not to retreat to the isthmus at Corinth, where the Spartan-led land forces prepared to defend the Peloponnesus. As the Persian fleet approached and it appeared he would lose the argument, he sent a secret message to the Persian commanders advising that the Athenian fleet was prepared to come over to the Persian side but that the remaining Greeks were threatening to flee to Corinth. An Egyptian squadron then moved to block the western end of the strait, forcing the Greeks into battle the next morning. The date of the battle is uncertain, falling sometime in September.
The Persian fleet (made up of Persian subjects and allies—the Persians were not sailors) heavily outnumbered the Greeks, but the narrow straits restricted their ability to bring their numbers to bear (Figure 5.2). The stiff breeze that blew up early in the battle hindered their ships more than it did the Athenians, whose ships were somewhat heavier and perhaps lower in profile. Though the Persian ships carried more marines, mostly Persians who would try to turn the fight into a land battle, as well as assuring the loyalty of suspect allied crews, the roll of the sea threw off the aim of the Persian bowmen, giving the advantage in hand-to-hand fighting to the Greek hoplite marines.
Yet it was Athenian ability to maneuver and ram that proved decisive. While much of the fighting must have been an opportunistic melee, Athenian units on the more open Greek left wing probably tried variations of the standard tactics used to gain an advantage when two lines of galleys faced each other bow to bow in line abreast. These included the periplus, or “sailing around,” by which one line would flank the other and so attack from the side and rear; and the more difficult but even more effective diekplus, or “breaking through,” in which one line would row through the gaps in the enemy line to suddenly turn and attack from behind. Artemesia, the queen of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, was one of the few Persian commanders to perform well on that day of naval dogfighting, ramming nine Athenian ships, as well as ramming and sinking another Persian ship to escape from an Athenian pursuer, who thus mistook her for a Greek. Xerxes, looking down at the battle from heights on the mainland, mistook her victim for a Greek and is said to have exclaimed, “My men have become women, my women, men!” By the end of the day, with over 200 Persian ships sunk and the rest in flight, the logistics of the Persian invasion were wrecked; Xerxes withdrew with much of his army shortly afterward, and the Greek land forces defeated the remainder the next year (see the Sources box “Herodotus on Salamis”).
Figure 5.2 The Battle of Salamis
Salamis is commonly rated one of the decisive battles of world history for its role in saving western civilization, at its origins, from oriental despotism. While this considerably overstates and oversimplifies the case—and, indeed, a recent historian of the battle reckons that Greek civilization might not have developed too differently even had the Greeks lost— Salamis was decisive in its own context, proving the wisdom of Themistocles and the importance naval power had assumed in warfare. Its impact on the subsequent development of Athenian naval power was even more dramatic and important.
The Athenian Navy and the Delian League
In 477, three years after Salamis, the Athenians put together a naval alliance, the Delian League, with a number of other city-states in Greece and around the Aegean, designed not just to defend Greece against further Persian invasions but to carry the struggle to that empire by freeing Ionian Greek cities from Persian rule in Asia Minor. Each league member contributed ships and men or money, with the treasury based on the island of Delos giving the league its name. Given both the preponderance of Athenian resources in the alliance and the ambitions Athens nurtured in the wake of its triumph in 480, not surprisingly, within twenty years, the Delian League had become, not an alliance of free states, but the mechanism of Athenian imperialism.
The contributions in ships and men from other states were gradually commuted to cash payments, with Athens monopolizing the building and manning of the warships of the league. Athens increasingly deployed this naval power against reluctant or renegade members to keep them in line, and their contributions came to be viewed as tribute. The treasury was moved from Delos to the rebuilt temple to Athena in Athens, where it joined the growing naval administration whose main office and functions had been created by Themistocles when he founded the navy. (Ironically, Themistocles was exiled in a power struggle in the 470s, and, by 464, he found himself working for the Persians as a regional administrator.)
The fleet remained ultimately under the control of the democratic Athenian assembly, which had final say on when and where the fleet was deployed, often on the advice of the Council of 500 that ran day-to-day government. In addition, a naval board supervised the operations of the shipyards at Piraeus, oversaw the courts of justice connected to service in the navy, and administered the funds disbursed for building, maintenance, and recruiting. The dock installations at Piraeus kept stocks of necessary equipment, specified in great detail in documents that archaeologists recently discovered. The state shifted part of the administrative burden from itself by requiring rich citizens to sponsor the building and maintenance of a trireme for a year; in return, the citizens received formal command of the ship, though they rarely exercised it in person, leaving effective captaincy to professionals.
Above all, the rowers for the fleet were drawn from the poorer, often landless, but free citizen classes of the city, hired at competitive wages. The importance of the fleet for Athenian defense translated into political importance for its rowers: Athenian democracy both sustained and was sustained by the state’s large- scale employment of landless men in the fleet. But as the fleet was also integral to Athenian imperialism, it embodied the contradiction at the heart of post- Salamis Athenian politics and the creative tension that arose from it. The ideal of democracy fit uncomfortably at the theoretical level with the oppressive practices of empire, and if most Athenian citizens seem to have been content to ignore the failure of their city to live up to its ideals in its foreign policy, some of its best minds, including playwrights, philosophers, and historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides, were not. Their Socratic gadflying on the topic produced some of the greatest masterpieces of Athenian literature in the fifth century and represent the most lasting legacy of Salamis.
Disaster and Recovery The rise of Athens to imperial dominance in the Delian League excited not just suspicion from Persia but deep mistrust from Sparta, the erstwhile leader of united Greek military ventures, and led in 431 to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. We traced that conflict in some detail in Chapter 3; here we will focus on the naval aspects of the war.
Athenian strategy in the war, as formulated by Pericles, rested on two bases: its walls, which were effective because of the primitive nature of Greek siege warfare, and the navy. Athens could afford to withdraw behind the walls that surrounded the city and connected it to its port, abandoning mainland Attica to Spartan depredations, because its fleet protected its maritime trade connections to colonies as far afield as the coast of the Black Sea that supplied the city with grain. As its subject allies were almost all on islands around the Aegean, the fleet guaranteed the safety of the empire and allowed Athens to keep those same allies in line by force.
Yet the limitation of the Athenian navy was that it could not project force inland and so could not threaten Spartan power in its homeland, since Sparta was not dependent on overseas trade for its economic survival. Thus, a strategic stalemate between Spartan land power and Athenian naval power characterized the war. Ironically, it was the naval power, even with its external contacts, that was unable to establish alliances with the land forces that might have brought Sparta to terms. Instead, Spartan diplomacy brought Persia into the picture, with Persian resources funding the construction of a fleet to rival Athens’. And part of the opportunity to challenge Athenian naval power resulted from Athens’ own disaster in Sicily in 415-413, the strategic overreach the expedition represented having been made possible by the freedom of action Athens’ fleet gave it. The difficulty of conducting joint land-sea operations, especially the siege of a major city such as Syracuse, showed up even for a fleet as experienced as Athens’. Eventually, the fleet found itself blockaded in the Syracusan harbor, lacking the room to maneuver and ram that were its strengths. The loss of 9000 hoplites and about 200 triremes was serious but, especially in the case of the ships, not insurmountable. The disaster was the loss of 25,000 trained rowers: The decline in quality of the fleet, which had to be manned by new recruits and even freed slaves, opened the door to the combined Spartan- Persian effort that brought the war to an end in 404.
This defeat was hardly the end of Athenian naval power, however. Within twenty years of the end of the war, the Athenian fleet had been completely rebuilt by a naval administration that survived in all its essentials. A new generation of trained rowers—perhaps 60,000 of them manning over 400 triremes and even some larger vessels at the height of Athens’ fourth-century power—took their places at the oars and in the democratic assembly of the city. It took the rise of Macedon to end Athenian naval power and introduce a fundamental shift in naval warfare generally.
In the following passages, the Greek historian Herodotus gives a vivid account of the historic sea battle.
[8.44] From the mainland of Greece beyond the Peloponnese, came the Athenians with a hundred and eighty ships, a greater number than that furnished by any other people; . . .
[8.48] Most of the allies came with triremes; but the Melians, Siphnians, and Seriphians, brought penteconters. . . . The whole number of the ships, without counting the penteconters, was three hundred and seventy-eight.
[8.84] The fleet had scarce left the land when they were attacked by the barbarians. At once most of the Greeks began to back water, and were about touching the shore, when Ameinias of Palline, one of the Athenian captains, darted forth in front of the line, and charged a ship of the enemy. The two vessels became entangled, and could not separate, whereupon the rest of the fleet came up to help Ameinias, and engaged with the Persians. Such is the account which the Athenians give of the way in which the battle began; but the Eginetans maintain that the vessel which had been to Egina for the Aeacidae, was the one that brought on the fight. It is also reported, that a phantom in the form of a woman appeared to the Greeks, and, in a voice that was heard from end to end of the fleet, cheered them on to the fight; first, however, rebuking them, and saying “Strange men, how long are you going to back water?”
[8.86] Far the greater number of the Persian ships engaged in this battle were disabled, either by the Athenians or by the Eginetans. For as the Greeks fought in order and kept their line, while the barbarians were in confusion and had no plan in anything that they did, the issue of the battle could scarce be other than it was. Yet the Persians fought far more bravely here than at Euboea, and indeed surpassed themselves; each did his utmost through fear of Xerxes, for each thought that the king’s eye was upon himself.
[8.89] . . . Of the Greeks there died only a few; for, as they were able to swim, all those that were not slain outright by the enemy escaped from the sinking vessels and swam across to Salamis. But on the side of the barbarians more perished by drowning than in any other way, since they did not know how to swim. The great destruction took place when the ships which had been first engaged began to fly; for they who were stationed in the rear, anxious to display their valour before the eyes of the king, made every effort to force their way to the front, and thus became entangled with such of their own vessels as were retreating.
[8.91] When the rout of the barbarians began, and they sought to make their escape to Phalerum, the Eginetans, awaiting them in the channel, performed exploits worthy to be recorded. Through the whole of the confused struggle the Athenians employed themselves in destroying such ships as either made resistance or fled to shore, while the Eginetans dealt with those which endeavoured to escape down the strait; so that the Persian vessels were no sooner clear of the Athenians than forthwith they fell into the hands of the Eginetan squadron.
[8.93] The Greeks who gained the greatest glory of all in the sea-fight off Salamis were the Eginetans, and after them the Athenians.
source: Herodotus, History.