CHAPTER 8
SHIPS
THE WAR AT SEA (431–404)

The Gathering Storm

Sicily did not end but, rather, reignited the old struggle with Sparta. Suddenly the entire war was on again, and its focus abruptly shifted from the west to far eastward, in the coastal waters off Asia Minor. The Athenian disaster would be followed by a final naval Armageddon in the eastern Aegean as a triumphant Sparta won over enough allies and Persian money to make good on its boast some twenty years earlier of winning by creating a massive fleet. Still, in the immediate aftermath of Sicily, there was a general consensus that Athens was immediately doomed—without enough ships, citizen warriors, or capital to keep enemies out of the Piraeus.

If the Peloponnesians could not storm a weakened Athens or destroy its hoplites, then it would squeeze the city and hope to wreck its seapower through a showdown on the Aegean. King Agis at Decelea ordered his allies to raise funds immediately to construct a fresh armada of 100 triremes to coordinate a joint land and sea strategy for finishing off the wounded adversary. What had happened to the previous Peloponnesian fleet during the first two decades of the war is not clear; but even the new plan to launch 100 triremes was not all that ambitious—and yet was dependent on Persian subsidies that would involve years of concessions and negotiations.

During this uncertain period immediately after the disaster in Sicily, subject states of Athens, initially the powerful Euboeans, Lesbians, and Chians, began to conspire with Sparta about defecting from the empire, even as the Persian satrap Tissaphernes sent his envoys to Sparta to offer his support for Peloponnesian maritime supremacy. Athens’ allies sensed that the end was near, and were furious anyway that the imperial city had led so many of their sons to mass slaughter in Sicily. Meanwhile, across the border in Thebes, the Boeotians stepped up their plundering of Attic farms and made ready to take back the disputed borderlands of the Oropus, a move that would enhance the success of insurrection on the nearby island of Euboea. “Everyone,” Diodorus concluded, “assumed that the war had come to an end—since no one expected that the Athenians even for a moment could endure such severe setbacks.”¹

At Athens itself, a special board of auditors (the probouloi) was appointed to craft ways to save the city and circumvent the assembly from proposing any further reckless adventures. The contingency fund of 1,000 talents, untouched since the outbreak of the war, was now tapped to begin reconstructing the fleet. This new idea that appointed senior Athenian statesmen—the aged playwright Sophocles was among them—would offer sober checks to the popular will foreshadowed widening splits among the citizenry and, indeed, the oligarchic revolution of 411 to come. Meanwhile, with the growing force of Peloponnesians at Decelea still kept out by the walls of Athens, with no hope of a final phalanx battle on the plains of Attica, and with the attention of all of Greece now turned to the flow of food and capital into the Piraeus, the outcome of this last chapter in the Peloponnesian conflict would hinge mostly on thousands of Greek seamen embarking on strange oared ships to kill one another far across the Aegean.

A Most Peculiar Ship

There has probably never been as bizarre yet successful a galley as the Greek trireme. Certainly no such oared vessel like it had been constructed and rowed on the Mediterranean before that time, nor has one since. If hoplite battle before the Peloponnesian War may have had a prior history of some two and a half centuries, trireme warfare was relatively new. Triremes themselves probably first appeared only in the middle and later part of the sixth century. Although the Phoenicians or Egyptians perhaps first mastered the art of building triremes, it was the growth of the Athenian empire in the mid-fifth century that saw the emergence of sophisticated naval tactics.

Lightness and balance, not seaworthiness and protection, seem to have been the chief aims in building good triremes. If middle-class landowners were almost invulnerable inside their traditional hoplite armor, the landless fought absolutely defenseless as they rowed nearly naked across the seas in these relatively novel ships. Although the trireme was not a particularly large platform, about 120 feet from bow to stern and 20 feet wide amidships, it could nevertheless carry 200 sailors, officers, and marines. The crew could row at nearly fifty strokes a minute to achieve short bursts of fighting speeds of almost ten knots as it delivered devastating force with its ram. A sail was used to rest the seamen while in transit when combat was unlikely.

So unique was the vessel’s tripartite system of oarage that until the last few decades scholars still could not even agree on how the trireme (from the Greek trieres, “three-fitted”) was powered. Because triremes were unusually buoyant and rarely equipped with ballast, they never really completely sank to the bottom—thus ensuring that there are presently few remains for underwater archaeologists to examine. What exactly is the significance of the “tri-” in the ship’s nomenclature? Did three men sit side by side on one bench, pulling jointly on a single oar? Or did three rowers pull three oars? Or, as is most likely, were there three banks of oarsmen, sitting at three levels, hitting the water from three different elevations and angles with their like-sized fourteen-foot oars?

Much of the puzzle that had evoked heated debate since the Renaissance was supposed to have been solved in 1987, when a joint British-Greek research team launched Olympias, a modern full-sized replica of a classical Athenian trireme. Despite problems in the performance of Olympias, even its limited sea trials confirmed that the often-conflicting ancient testimonia about triremes probably meant that there could be three levels of oarsmen, each rower with his standard-sized oar. But the simulations on Olympias also reminded us of just how miserable naval service was for thousands of seamen—despite not being shackled and chained like Roman galley slave rowers—and how tricky it was for rowers to synchronize their strokes with their light firwood oars. Indeed, so far the modern craft has never quite achieved levels of performance commensurate with those of ancient ships as suggested by classical texts.

The most cramped and unpleasant positions in the 120-foot-long ship probably belonged to the 54 thalamites. These poor crewmen rowed from deep in the hold (thalamos), crammed in a scant eighteen inches above the water. Leather pads in their oar holes in theory kept the waves out. But seawater always splashed in anyway—the ship was honeycombed with over one hundred such holes—and bilge water also seeped through the planking near their feet. Sailors were probably soaked on and off throughout the entire voyage. As a rower pulled and leaned back and then pushed forward, his rear scooted to and fro along the bench, explaining why seamen considered seat cushions as important as good oars—and why rump blisters were a common complaint.

Because of the crossbeams and the other seamen rowing directly above their heads, the thalamites could see almost nothing. The sweat from the two superior banks of rowers—the posteriors of the seamen above were more or less in the thalamites’ faces—drenched them as well. The comic poet Aristophanes joked that the thalamites were often farted upon and even showered with excrement from the straining oarsmen above, a scatological reference that he may have derived from the common and collective real-life miseries of the veterans in the theater audience. Sweat, thirst, blisters, exhaustion, urine, and feces—all this was in addition to the billows of the sea and the iron of the enemy.²

Yelling, confrontation, perhaps even outright fights were common as rowers elbowed one another. Anyone who has tried to put on football gear in a jam-packed, steamy August locker room can get some idea of the petty squabbles and temper tantrums below the deck. Sometimes crewmen fouled each other’s oars, or encroached on another’s cramped rowing space. By the end of the war, after thousands of citizen rowers were long dead, the poor, foreigners, residents, and slaves were drafted and all sat together, finding a messy equality on benches that was unknown even in the democratic assembly.

Crewmen always preferred striking calm seas to achieve the greatest efficiency. Yet because of the disharmony of three tiers of oarsmen, only 30 of some 170 rowers ever really hit completely undisturbed seas. Most rowers, then, were pulling their oars in the wake of others and found it difficult to hit choppy and swirling waters squarely with any force.

Right above the lowly thalamites sat the middle bank of 54 zygite oarsmen, who were perched on the ship’s main crossbeams (zyga). They, too, could not see the water and rowed through portholes. But at least these “crossbeamers” in the middle bank had more room and did not have to contend with the legs and the rumps of the oarsmen above.

The top row of two banks, the most prestigious slots and so often the best paid, was occupied by 62 thranites in total, port and starboard. These elite rowers were above the splashing of the seas and enjoyed constant breezes. They sat on an outrigger, and besides the fresh air, sunlight, and greater room could alone of the crew see their oars hit the sea and communicate with the rowers below. If they were the most vulnerable to enemy missiles, thranites were also the most likely to get out of the ship alive if it was rammed and sank.

Presumably those rowers with either the greatest experience or demonstrably superior skills, whether judged by consistently hitting the water with a full stroke or stamina in maintaining a steady pull for hours on end, were selected for these favored benches on the ship. Thranites seemed to have set the pulse of the oarage for the entire crew. They were those most attuned to the vagaries of wind and current, nearby ships, and their combined effect on the trireme’s speed and steadiness. Indeed, because of the elite rowers’ expertise and experience, nominal thranites may have sometimes been scattered throughout the ship on all three banks to ensure that such steady role models were never far away.

The competence of rowers varied widely within a fleet. Sometimes oarsmen could be culled out and assembled together to create a small elite flotilla that could achieve speeds consistently greater than normal. Experience seems to be the requisite for rowing excellence. So it is probable that many of the best rowers were in their thirties and forties and—at Athens, at least—veterans of dozens of campaigns when the war broke out.³

Battle Afloat

When a phalanx—thousands of men in polished armor arrayed in neat columns—lowered its spears in unison, it was lauded as a fierce hedgehog raising its bristles. For the Greeks the banked oars of a fast-moving trireme swishing in perfect rhythm in and out of the sea lent an equally profound impression of a living, breathing entity. As dozens of such eerie vessels bore down on an enemy in matched order and cadence, crews and onlookers alike were caught up in the spectacle. On the ships’ prows, painted or inlaid-marble apotropaic eyes glowered like sea monsters at the doomed target ahead.

Part of the trick in turning mundane wooden triremes into frightening visual spectacles centered on their multifarious decorations: eyes, nameplates, painted figureheads, and various ornaments. Perhaps the only way to tell one state’s trireme from another’s was the wooden statue of the particular tutelary deity affixed above the ram—in the case of Athens, representations of Pallas Athena. Because many of these ships were paid for and outfitted by private citizens, there was a natural rivalry among the wealthy to launch the most impressive trireme in the fleet, one that might not only startle potential enemies but also encourage the better oarsmen to sign up as rowers.

Fleets could become symbols of national power and were often specially adorned to galvanize public support and acclaim. Returning admirals often garlanded their triremes, decked them out with captured arms, and towed dozens of captured ships into port—such as Alcibiades’ magnificent return to the Piraeus from triumph in the Hellespont, when the Athenian fleet arrived hauling in 200 captured Peloponnesian triremes.⁴

“A terror to enemies” and “a joy to her friends,” Xenophon wrote of an oared ship in ramming mode, the chief method of attack. The swish of the oar, the rhothion, of a rapidly advancing trireme was famous. Both the sound and the look added to the drama, and presaged something terrible to come. Thucydides emphasized “the fear of the swishing” (phobos rhothiou), which only compounded the scary sight of a trireme bearing down. Triremes, like later full-masted men-of-war, were beautiful and occasionally noisy vessels, and they captured contemporaries’ imaginations in ways most other more workmanlike warships, from Roman galleys to ironclads, did not. With a length six or seven times its width and a massive ram, the sleek trireme in one sense was simply a floating spear.⁵

The protocols of sea battle by intent resembled a hoplite encounter on water. The generals harangued their troops before embarking. Both sides usually sought to ram and smash each other. Combatants chanted a war cry. Upon conclusion, the dead were given up under truce, and a trophy was erected nearby on shore. If Greek infantrymen ran into battle yelling, Eleleu! or Alala!, sailors kept mostly silent, at least until the final seconds. Sometimes as they went into their ramming strokes for the last few thousand yards before collision they chanted in unison, Ryppapai! Ryppapai! Ryppapai! and O opop! O opop!—or so Aristophanes wrote.

Just as often, as if they were hoplites in the phalanx, they broke out in a longer, more formulaic war cry or chant, the paean, to keep cadence, promote élan, terrify the enemy, and ward off evil. As triremes approached the enemy, trumpets would sound, the war cry would reverberate throughout the fleet, and general shouting would erupt, veteran rowers especially eager to be the first to strike the enemy fleet.⁶

Order and unity were critical on board oared ships, amid the distractions of the loud swishing and the piper’s tune to guarantee good rowing time. Idle chatter and its resulting inattention might mean that a Greek trireme’s 170 oars—broad, short shafts for the calm waters of the Mediterranean—would soon fall out of synchronization. In a matter of seconds, the relatively light ship could stall or become buffeted by winds. So, for example, in 429 the Athenian admiral Phormio reminded his sailors as they set out for a second engagement against the Peloponnesian fleet in the Corinthian Gulf, “Be careful to keep order and silence”—the keys to battle success—“especially in sea warfare.” The challenge for trireme warfare was not just enemy ships but also the very intricate mechanics of oared propulsion itself.⁷

Most trireme sailors rowed blindly, not just by rote and practice but also through the sheer inability to see the sea below. Indeed, 108 of the 170 rowers, those in the two lower vertical banks, sat enclosed inside the hull. They could not even steal a momentary glance to see their own oars hit the water. To learn where and how far away the enemy was, these sightless oarsmen counted on the warnings of the coxswain, and perhaps even the top bank of rowers, perched on the outriggers. The latter might for a few seconds lift their heads up to scan the oarage and warn of problems, periodically apprising the rest of the crew of the efficacy of their own blind strokes.

Yet given the low ride of a trireme in the sea, even the officers and seamen in the top bank of oars could take in very little of the battle. Greece’s ubiquitous headlands and promontories often cut off sight lines in battles, which were typically fought close to shore. In the case of the Ionian theater, especially in the battles in the Hellespont at Aegospotami, Cynossema, Cyzicus, and Sestos, triremes were often rarely more than two or three miles from the coast. Unlike land warfare, there were no hills from which trierarchs might look down upon the nature of their deployment either before or during the battle—or the tall masts of later men-of-war, by which the pilot could send up lookouts to shout coordinates to officers below.

The blind world of a Greek warship suddenly ended when the trireme either hit the enemy or was rammed itself. “Quite simply, over the entire harbor arose the crash of the colliding ships and the cry of desperate struggling men, killing and in turn dying,” Diodorus wrote of the Athenian fleet as it smashed into its Syracusan counterpart in the Great Harbor. “No one could hear any of the commands once the boats hit each other and their oars smashed together, and at the same time was added the racket of the men fighting on the ships and their supporters on shore.” Diodorus reminds us, “When a ship was caught by several triremes, and struck in every direction by their massive rams, once the water poured in, the ship and its entire crew were swallowed by the sea.”

When triremes collided, men were immediately jarred from their seats, and bedlam followed. If they were on the attack, the orders—how the boatswain’s commands could be heard in the midst of battle is unknown—went out to back immediately to disengage the ram from the struck ship, lest the doomed enemy seamen and marines swarm onto their own decks.

In turn, if struck broadside at ten knots with a wooden ram weighing four to five hundred pounds and sheathed and tipped with bronze, seamen either jumped into the water or boarded the attacker in the few seconds before their own trireme, penetrated at the waterline, was partially submerged. When the Athenian assembly voted to put down the rebellion at Mytilene or to launch an armada against Sicily, most of the 6,000 to 7,000 voters crammed onto the rocky Pynx—the meeting place below the Acropolis—were themselves veterans of this macabre warfare at sea: rowers and rammers first, participants in democracy second.

At top speed a trireme could power into a targeted hull with fifty tons’ worth of destructive force and send in thousands of gallons of seawater in seconds. Indeed, sometimes the first hit put such an enormous hole in the enemy hull that the ship was immediately swamped. But a Greek warship could attack only in one direction. Even its own few missile troops offered little offense amidships. In some cases skilled crewmen could orchestrate ramming attacks against a number of ships that found themselves unable to turn about, knocking apart targeted triremes even as they sought to flee past, to shore.

Free-for-All

Prepositioning in trireme fighting was everything. Amid wind, waves, and other ships, once battle commenced it could take critical minutes to turn around such a large oared ship to face an attacking enemy. On a normally outfitted ship, only about 4 or 5 archers and some 10 or so marines on deck hit passing ships with missiles, or were ready to board and fight on enemy decks once a trireme came into range. If the fight was in the calm waters of harbors, crews could stockpile stones. Then when two ships were stuck in a death grip, dozens who were not trained archers or marines might pelt their adversaries, in hopes of killing the enemy’s available oarsmen. This auxiliary crew of soldiers was vital: if a ship lost its own infantry defenders, enemy hoplites could easily slaughter the packed crew trapped below as it scrambled to climb out, the men for the most part half-naked and without arms. And when a trireme went down, enemy sailors might hover around to spear defenseless oarsmen who frantically reemerged, gasping for air. At the battle in the Great Harbor at Syracuse (413), “those who were swimming away from their sunken ships were wounded by arrows or killed outright when struck by spears.”⁸

Admirals usually commanded the fleet from the lead ships. There was no flagship full of officers at the rear. Some of the most well-known commanders—in the manner of Lord Nelson—died at sea, like the Athenian Eurymedon at Syracuse and the Spartan Mindarus at the battle of Cyzicus. On rare days defeated commanders killed themselves, and their bodies were washed ignominiously to shore—such was the case with the Spartan Timocrates at the second defeat in the Corinthian Gulf in 429.⁹

The rowers had to sense the pulse of the battle, since most verbal orders were impossible to hear when wood hit wood. Most sailors were probably trained to row blindly and adjust their rhythm to what they felt and sensed rather than saw or heard. Being rammed in the vulnerable broadsides was not the only worry. Sometimes ships hit each other head-on and got locked together, victory in that case going to the vessel that could pull out more quickly and had suffered less from the leakage caused by a damaged ram. In theory, a dozen or so crewmen scurried around with extra oars, planking, and rigging to plug holes and ensure that a disabled ship could stay afloat. In fact, even a small leaking hole would partially submerge a trireme in minutes. In engagements of 200 to 300 ships—and there were several such showdowns in the latter Peloponnesian War—40,000 to 60,000 men, the equivalent of a large Greek city, were at once hurling missiles, rowing, boarding, clinging to wreckage, and swimming to shore. So in minutes the seas were flooded with the flotsam and jetsam of broken triremes, bodies, and men splashing and clinging to debris.

Because there were no uniforms or clear naval insignia—oarsmen probably wore little more than a loincloth during summer sailing—crews sometimes even attacked their own ships, killing friendly sailors in the heat and panic of battle. Often ships were grappled and snagged. Then the sea fight “of the old style” might better resemble a land battle, as both marines and rowers joined in the confused melee. The immediate goal was to kill more enemy sailors than you lost friendly seamen, and then to choose the more seaworthy of the two craft and try to disentangle and row away from the wreckage. Thucydides concludes of the battle of Sybota, fought two years before the war, that the killing was so tumultuous, no one could hear anything at all in the clamor; he adds that victory hinged more on force than on skill:

The Peloponnesians and, later, the Syracusans learned that to defeat the Athenians it was necessary to neutralize their superior seamanship—inasmuch as almost all Greek maritime states throughout the eastern Mediterranean had “gone trireme” and built ships that were remarkably uniform in size and construction. Overcoming Athenian expertise was sometimes accomplished by fighting in the narrows, employing head-on crashes with reinforced rams, or using small boats with missile troops to row alongside and shower the enemy with javelins. Just as the Athenians had learned never to meet Spartan hoplites in a so-called fair fight on a level plain, her enemies acknowledged that it was equally perilous in the early years of the war to take on the experienced Athenian fleet in open waters. The key to understanding the Peloponnesian War is not just that Athens was a naval power and Sparta fought by land; rather, of the 1,500-some city-states Athens was by far the strongest seapower, while Spartan hoplites were the preeminent infantry in Greece.

Only superbly trained crews could maintain their triremes in any formation, given the vagaries of wind and current and the fear of enemy attack. The Athenian admiral Phormio, for example, at the first battle of Naupaktos completely encircled the Corinthian fleet and left it in confusion, buffeted by panicking sailors struggling to row in seas that were choppy and full of confused triremes. One of the problems of waging the Ionian War in or near the Hellespont was that the strong current of the strait often made operations nearly impossible.

Even when fighting started, the running, hurling, and jumping of even a half dozen combatants on the deck, in addition to their sheer weight, must have made the careful work of the rowers beneath almost impossible, explaining why the triremes were often “motionless” as the deck fighting proceeded. Rarely in the history of sea warfare has the range of options been so severely curtailed by the fragile nature of the craft involved. Often defeat at sea is attributed not to enemy action but to the simple confusion and misdirection of desperate rowers trying to keep their ships in proper attack formation against the variables of wind and current. For example, the Spartan general Gylippus assured his crews at Syracuse (413) that the Athenian plan to load their triremes with extra marines—to turn the battle in the Great Harbor into a sort of infantry tumult—would be counterproductive precisely because so many men scrambling on deck and their lack of training at throwing javelins while sitting would confuse the rowers and put the ships off keel.¹¹

Modern simulations have suggested that even the presence of a single man moving about on the canopy deck of a trireme could adversely affect the rowing. And the accuracy of such missile troops was not very good anyway except at very close ranges, given that both platform and target were rolling on the waves. Part of the crew’s training, then, was not merely rowing but the ability to work without extraneous movement that could interrupt offensive operations of the ship, and even jeopardize the ship’s safety while in transit.

All sides tried to apply innovations to the standard trireme design to gain an advantage in what was mostly a collision between like ships. As triremes raced into battle, crews often put up side screens (pararrumata) to deflect missiles with flat trajectories from hitting the top bank of rowers (the thranite seamen) or to keep arced shots from raining down among the entire crew. The idea of such airborne assault was not to kill all the crew but perhaps to stun, wound, or disable enough oarsmen to disrupt the very movement of the ship, since a trireme’s smooth strokes could be ruined by losing key rowers to wounds or panic.¹²

In other instances, ship-to-ship engagements were not even the focus of sea battle. Instead, sometimes in harbor battles divers drove stakes into shallow waters to tear out the hulls of unsuspecting triremes. In response to these close-to-shore tactics, specially outfitted triremes were equipped with cranes to pull such obstacles from the bottom of harbors, while forces on land fought over forts and docks, on the assumption that at some point the fleet would have to come in, be resupplied, and undergo repairs.¹³

The same ingenuity of response and counterresponse that had characterized the siege of Plataea was extended to sea, or at least to fighting on calmer waters near land. Merchant ships might cluster around harbors or places of refuge to offer safe haven for their own retreating triremes. On rare occasions crews hung enormous lead weights (“dolphins”), or even heavy stones, from their much longer spars, which could then be dropped opportunely onto enemy triremes as they raced in, plunging through the benches and decks, and tearing holes in the hull.¹⁴

Even straightforward sea fights rarely resulted in simple contact between two opposing triremes. More often it was instead a matter of three ships hitting two, or four against one—and being rammed while ramming the enemy. Besides ramming and boarding ships, there was a third way to ruin a trireme: cutting off its path to the open seas and gradually forcing it landward, where it could be driven onto shore, beached, and its crew rendered temporarily helpless as land-based infantry rushed into the surf to cut down sailors struggling to leave the ship.

Thucydides emphasizes just such chaos at the infamous battle of Sybota, on the eve of the war, when the Corinthians had no idea whether they were winning or being conquered by the Corcyraean fleet. Out of this bedlam within an hour or two a general consensus arose that one side—in the first few years of the war usually the more skilled and numerous Athenians and their allies—was destroying more ships than it was losing. Then the call went out among the defeated for each ship to save itself and row in frenzy back to base. Because triremes were costly and, like bronze panoplies, universally used by all sides in the Peloponnesian War, disabled ships and even floating wrecks were precious. They were also easily salvageable, since without ballast ruined vessels rarely were lost, but bobbed about only partially submerged. Because triremes relied on speed rather than stability to guarantee survival there was very little sand or stone in the hold as ballast, and water jugs were probably all that was carried to provide stabilizing weight.

Trireme buoyancy explains why ancient descriptions of sea battles are replete with broken ships and planks fouling the surface. The victors immediately tried to rope and tow away any ship worth possible salvaging on the theory that these showy trophies were far less expensive to repair than the construction of entirely new triremes and might offset the enormous costs involved in naval warfare. As in the case of hoplite panoplies, the equipment of trireme warfare was recyclable, the winners sometimes ending even hard-fought battles with more ships than when they’d begun. The aftermath of a trireme engagement must have been a strange sight, as dozens of wrecks were tied to the victors’ ships, which rowed off with tow cables. Indeed, so similar in appearance were the respective fleets that both sides were often unsure whether sudden reinforcements were friendly or hostile.

In general, sea fights lasted far longer than hoplite battles, inasmuch as marching forward to spear and slash in heavy armor was a more exhausting task than to row at sea.

Lots of Ways to Die

Greek sailors were familiar with the seas, and in almost every maritime battle the fighting took place within a few thousand yards of shore. Mass drownings should have been relatively avoidable, unlike the debacle at Salamis, where perhaps 40,000 Persians and their allies, many fully clothed and unused to the water, were lost amid the wreckage. The scandal at the battle of Arginusae, after which six of the victorious Athenian generals were executed for allowing hundreds of their kindred sailors to drown while clinging to debris in storm-driven seas, was an aberration, thus explaining the unusual wrath of the Athenian assembly, which could not be assuaged even by the fact of the enemy’s far greater losses.

Frequent drowning was relatively common inasmuch as few Greeks swam on a regular basis to guarantee their survival in rough seas. When a ship was hit, it was not easy to get out from the cramped rowing bench, climb through dozens of panicky seamen, avoid jagged wooden debris, missiles, and boarders, and then swim the thousands of yards to shore. On a crippled ship, the key to survival was to manage to disengage, row away, and allow the crew to jump overboard well distant from the enemy—such as the Athenians who escaped after their defeat at Notium in 406, losing 22 ships but saving most of the sailors.

What percentage of a ship’s crew was lost when a trireme was submerged is not recorded. Yet there are plenty of descriptions in Greek literature to suggest that on occasion a ship’s entire complement of seamen could be killed, lost, or taken prisoner. Inclement weather—as, for example, off Cape Athos in 411 (12 of 10,000 saved) or at the battle of Arginusae in 406—seemed to ensure that sinking warships would doom their entire crews.¹⁵

It was not an easy thing for the wounded and bleeding to be picked up by friendly ships or to swim to land. And very few of the uninjured could climb out of the cramped hull safely and quickly—not when the task of merely embarking took several minutes, as the crew tried to find their proper places. Even if oarsmen made it out of a damaged ship without major injuries, they were not home free. Rough seas, foul weather, the cold, and more could easily ensure that thousands went down even when clinging to floating debris.

Drowning was considered the most nightmarish of deaths in Greek popular religion. It was angst over that dreaded end of hundreds of their comrades that led the Athenians to put their own generals on trial after the victory at Arginusae in 406. Thousands back home lamented their kinsmen’s souls roaming the netherworld without rest while their unclaimed bodies rotted without proper burial observance. The scapegoating after Arginusae, along with the vote and revote concerning the fate of the prisoners on Mytilene and the postbellum trial of Socrates, is usually recalled as one of the worst moments in the history of Athenian democracy. One of the most eerie scenes in Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians is his account of the show trials: the inebriate demagogue sauntering into the assembly hall, decked out in his breastplate, ready to denigrate, browbeat, or accuse any who stood between him and butchering the very men who had given Athens its greatest victory. In any case, the people soon repented their stupid and immoral action. Callixeinos, the proposer of the illegal motion to try all the Arginusae generals on death charges en masse, “was hated by everyone and died of starvation.”¹⁶

Often the victors were more brutal than the chilly and choppy seas. Rowers, after all, like aircraft-carrier crews, were also premium military assets who took months to train and who, once lost, were not easily replaced. Although the rules of war in theory protected prisoners at sea, as the conflict wore on clemency was ignored and the more savage protocols of the siege and ambush took hold. Often it made better sense to row away and leave the wounded of the enemy to the seas. Only that way could the manpower pool of skilled oarsmen be permanently reduced, without incurring the odium of violating understood conventions that might prompt retaliation—the sea, not men, killing the defenseless in the water.

Yet sometimes captured crews were brought ashore and either cut down or maimed—often grotesquely, by cutting off the right hand or thumb to guarantee that they could never row again. It is unclear which side began to initiate such brutal practices. But in the later part of the Ionian War, the Athenian general Philocles persuaded the Athenian assembly to go on record as allowing trireme captains to chop off the right hand of all prisoners taken at sea. Presumably his idea was that only such tough measures would stop the desertions of imperial seamen tempted to join the Spartans by promises of higher pay.

Philocles himself was known to have ordered captured oarsmen thrown overboard on the high seas, which explains why the Spartans executed almost every Athenian they got their hands on after their final victory at Aegospotami—a staggering number that might have reached 3,500. On an early-fifth-century black-figure vase, prisoners at sea are shown bound with rope, thrown overboard, and then pushed underwater with sticks and spears—suggesting that such a cruel fate was not uncommon.¹⁷

The execution of the Athenian prisoners after Aegospotami—Philocles himself was executed on Lysander’s orders—may have ranked as the worst single-day execution of Greeks in the entire war. More were probably butchered than those cut down at Mytilene, Scione, and Melos and the dead exceeded the number of those murdered by the infamous Thirty Tyrants, who overthrew the democracy at war’s end. The toll from Aegospotami was not matched until Alexander the Great killed almost every Theban male when he razed Thebes in 335 or cut down most of the Greek mercenaries in the aftermath of Granicus, a year later. Lysander would have done better to spare the crew, sell them into slavery, and share the profits with his own oarsmen, a practice that was common by war’s end as well.¹⁸

Perhaps the most common method of dispatching defeated seamen was to sail amid the wreckage and spear them like fish. The accepted idea was that the battle was not quite over, and thus men clinging to enemy wreckage were still fair game and could be killed without moral censure or fear of reprisals. After the battle off the Sybota Islands, the Corinthian ships rowed among the wreckage killing all the Corcyraean survivors they could find. So intent were they on finishing off the helpless enemy that they ignored towing back the damaged ships and finally even inadvertently began murdering their own men in the water. At the second battle off Naupaktos a contingent of Athenian ships got cut off and was driven to shore. Once beached, all the crewmen who could not lumber out of their triremes were executed on their benches by boarders.¹⁹

Two millennia before the victorious Christians at Lepanto (1571) had scoured the wreckage to execute any Ottomans found alive in the water—after that battle at least 30,000 Turks were presumed killed—the Greeks of the Peloponnesian War accepted the brutal calculus that the murder of helpless sailors meant less chance of meeting such trained rowers in the next round of battle. Hoplites on all sides were farmers or property owners; in contrast, rowers were the poor and foreigners—even, at times, slaves—who shared no gentlemanly pretensions about some mythical common agrarian status. Often it was the marines, mostly hoplite soldiers themselves, who did much of the spearing of trapped rowers—and who would have been the first to have perished in their breastplates once the ship was swamped. Most of those killed on deck may well have been lost to missiles rather than drowning. Yet because Thucydides and other historians almost always record naval losses by triremes destroyed or captured, it makes it nearly impossible to translate such generalization into any accurate number of killed or wounded. The particular condition of the seas, the nature of nearby land, the attitude held toward the enemy, and the status of the ship could all determine how many sailors escaped a doomed trireme.²⁰

Reputation and Fear

The Spartans were essentially wiped out at the sea battle of Arginusae. The Athenian fleet ceased to exist after Aegospotami. In the former case, the Athenians enjoyed immediate naval supremacy and the Spartans sought peace. In the latter, the Athenians lost the war in a single day as Lysander’s fleet made ready to sail into Athens.

Entire fleets that acknowledged their seamen to be inexperienced were often scared that a superior navy would make short work of them. It was precisely that fear that prompted Athens to keep a reserve fund of 1,000 talents and 100 of “the best” triremes to protect the Piraeus, as a last resort should the Peloponnesians ever achieve naval supremacy and thus cruise freely in the Aegean and then right into their home port. Even the Athenians accepted the fact that at sea anything could happen, that whole fleets with thousands could go down in a few hours.²¹

Because there was no way to stop Pericles’ navy in the early years of the war, Corinthian ships were often terrified at the very approach of the Athenian triremes. Against Phormio in the Corinthian Gulf they became so confused by superior Athenian seamanship that they gave up defending themselves and tried to row away to safety. In response to the acknowledged asymmetry, the Syracusan Hermocrates conceded to his followers the superior proficiency of his Athenian enemies—“the skill of the enemy that you so especially dread”—but insisted that their own greater number of ships and courage could still trump such Athenian advantages if they confined the battle to favored locales. Phobos, or fear of “the dreadful Athenian presence,” is often alluded to as a prime factor in all sea battles with the Athenians before their catastrophe in Sicily, as if most other Greeks admitted that they had little chance of survival in a fair fight against such seamen.²²

When the war broke out the Athenians themselves proved arrogant, convinced after the fifty-year administration of a maritime empire that they were de facto invincible at sea, “lords of the sea,” as they were generally acknowledged. Like the nineteenth-century British navy, the Athenian fleet felt that its qualitative superiority meant that it could attack any enemy at any time—whatever the theater imbalance in numbers. At the famous battle in the Corinthian Gulf in 429 Phormio told his men to disregard the size of the enemy armada: “Inasmuch as they were Athenians, they would never retreat before Peloponnesian ships, however great their number.” In the Athenian mind, victory now paid dividends later, since the rest of the Hellenic world would be constantly reminded of the futility of challenging Athenian ships. As Phormio further put it, “When men have once experienced defeat, they are not willing to maintain the same ideas about facing the same dangers.”

Ironically, that truism was never more valid than after the Athenian calamity in Sicily; the Athenians became as paralyzed with fear as the Spartans had been over a decade earlier after their own debacle on Pylos. Immediately the Athenians lost their confidence at sea. For the first time in two decades they systematically began to lose ships to the newly constructed Peloponnesian fleet. For two years, imperial seamen were fearful of battle altogether, until the victory at Cynossema in summer 411 restored some of their old swagger.²³

Because naval battles took place among frail ships in often unfriendly waters and involved tens of thousands of combatants, the real lethal theaters of the Peloponnesian War turned out not to be hoplite battlefields or even sieges. The historian Barry Strauss once systematically counted only the precise fatality figures for Athenian infantrymen and their landless counterparts as recorded by contemporary sources—a fraction of the actual number, since most ancient Greek historians far more often use vague words like “many were lost” or omit casualties figures at specific battles altogether. He nevertheless observed that over twice as many Athenian thetes (who were mostly sailors) died than hoplites during the twenty-seven-year war, most of them in the brutal final decade of naval fighting. If the hoplites and cavalrymen had suffered inordinately in siege and amphibious operations during the first decade of the war, the greater losses after 413 were almost all among the rowers. When one speaks of the Peloponnesian War, the specters of Sicily, the plague, and the executions at Melos and Scione haunt our imaginations. Yet the real carnage came late in the war and at sea battles whose names are now mostly forgotten.²⁴

The Crews

The most bizarre facet of ancient naval power was the general method of manning the triremes, a mixture of private and public finance and control that was common practice in most of the city-states. Each year at Athens, for example, four hundred of the wealthiest citizens were put on notice as being liable for obligation as trierarchs (trireme commanders), which entailed, among other responsibilities, active command of a warship at sea. Because the fleet during the war numbered about 300 ships—at one point in the war 250 triremes were at sea at the same time—three out of four annual designees were then further selected and proceeded to the dockyards at the Piraeus to take control of their allotted ships for one year.

The state usually supplied the hull, the fittings, and the crew, although in a few instances some rich men bought and outfitted their own warships altogether. But the trierarch was mostly responsible for much of the ship’s daily expenses—repairs, food, and water for the crew—and usually served as the de facto captain while on patrol. Although a few grandees sought to skimp on expenses, more often trierarchs spent far more than was required, in keen rivalry with one another to find the best rowers and helmsmen. Such, apparently, were the wages of military philanthropy.

Private largess lavished on public ships—better rigging, hiring the best pilots, and adding bonuses to the daily wage of the rowers—might not only bring trierarchs renown but also increase the odds that in battle they themselves would survive. Thucydides says that when the Athenians left for Sicily, they departed with the best crews, ships, rigging, and figureheads. In both fighting ability and appearance, the flotilla of 415 was far more impressive than any prior armada, even those past great expeditions to Epidaurus and Potidaea at the beginning of the war, which had nevertheless set out with “poor equipment.”

At first glance such private initiative seems out of character for an all-inclusive state government like that of imperial Athens. In fact, the trierarchy was a forced contribution on the part of the wealthy to the state, what the Greeks called a liturgy. Besides finding a way to tap the capital of the rich, the polis also wished for its most wealthy citizens to serve side by side with the poorest while at sea. Some hoplites and cavalrymen, owners of farms and conservative in their political thinking, might resent the rise of a naval state. Yet the richest of all in times of war found themselves being honored for serving at the cutting edge of Athenian power. The trireme, in other words, was an extension of the democratic Athenian state and served the larger civic interest of acculturating thousands as they worked together in cramped conditions and under dire circumstances.²⁵

Throughout classical literature the need for skilled rowers is a constant refrain. Three men from different elevations plying about the same length oars would have to maintain a synchronized sweep, always hitting the water, never striking a nearby oar, thus insuring what the Greeks called the “simultaneous hits of the oar” (kôpês xymbolê). Practice in rowing in unison was a constant requirement, and apparently a skill easily lost through inaction. It was not just that rowers had to have strength and learn to row in synchronization; they also had to get used to hitting rough seas with their oars, become accustomed to the crash and roar of battle, and expect to cruise for long hours in both heat and cold.²⁶

States in the Peloponnese were always looking to reach nautical parity with Athens or Corcyra by promises that they could outbid competitors on the open market and that way hire away experienced mercenary rowers from what was an apparently limited pool. But even Peloponnesian leaders acknowledged that matching long-held Athenian rowing expertise “would take time.” So they agreed with Pericles’ confident prewar prediction that sea power was “a fulltime occupation,” something not so easily acquired by farmers and amateurs. That for twenty years Spartan triremes had little chance against the Athenians bears out his cocky assessment, just as the early-nineteenth-century Napoleonic fleet found its wonderfully constructed ships still no match for centuries of British naval mastery. Pericles apparently was prescient when he warned that there would be little opportunity for the Spartans to gain belated expertise in a real war—as if enemies could suddenly learn to row when the Athenian fleet was systematically scouring their shores. At war’s end, when Spartan parity with the Athenians was reached, it is difficult to ascertain whether the Peloponnesians had become qualitatively better as oarsmen or, after the losses to the plague and at Sicily, the Athenians had gotten far worse.²⁷

Swamping Triremes

What was the goal of the classical Greeks, then, in adopting such an awkward method of naval construction and operation, a nautical science that seems to have reached its apex at Athens shortly before the war broke out? Clearly, the desire for speed and power relative to displacement was a central driving force: sea battles were to be decided not always by marines but by quick ships that could ram, withdraw, and nimbly maneuver to strike again. To achieve ramming power required speed, and speed in turn necessitated 170 actual rowers on a relatively light vessel—and that near-impossible calculus of weight, speed, and manpower explains the complex method of banking three oarsmen to allow so many men to fit in such a small space. Impressed philosophers often commented on this peculiar method of rowing, calling oared ships “mills,” a crowded factory that turned out as its product sheer muscular propulsion.

The Athenians, who screamed freely among their betters in the assembly, baptized their triremes with names (apparently always in the feminine gender) not merely like “Empire” (Hegemonia) or “Most Powerful” (Kratistê) but also “Freedom” (Eleutheria), “Democracy” (Dêmokratia), “Free Speech” (Parrhêsia), and “Justice” (Dikaiosynê). Perhaps the frequent references to Athenian maritime excellence do not arise out of the state’s commitment to building numerous triremes or even the long service accrued from overseeing a maritime empire. At least at the start of the war, at Athens the rowers were for the most part all free voting citizens in a manner not true of the Peloponnesian fleet, suggesting that their unique élan at sea was a reflection that oarsmen felt that they had a stake in the very society they rowed to defend. In any case, wide-scale mutinies were rare in the Athenian fleet, but perhaps more common among the Peloponnesians, even in the last decade of the war, when things were beginning to go Sparta’s way.²⁸

The Athenians—who put a far greater premium on nautical skills than on the presence of hoplites and boarders on their triremes—mastered two general methods of ramming. Both required well-trained crews and quick, light ships. When employing the diekplous (“sailing through and out”), a row of ships tried to blast an enemy line of triremes. Once through, the attackers could then ram their targets from the inside of the enemy formation. In contrast, under the more subtle periplous (“sailing around”), the fleet tried to outflank or even encircle the enemy. Most fleets lacked such seamanship, and if it was a question of ramming Athenian triremes in a fair fight, the Peloponnesians would usually lose, suggesting the more desperate alternative of boarding and missile attack.

The Athenian object was, again, to maneuver into the line of exposed ship sides that could be rammed by columns of fast-moving triremes—a sort of “crossing the T” in the pre-dreadnought age. The Athenians believed that in the relatively open seas the greater maneuverability and speed of their own ships would eventually ensure that the usually more inept enemy would become confused and exposed to easy attack. In other words, under optimum conditions the contest would be a true naval battle rather than a land fight between hoplites and missile troops on pitching decks close to shore.²⁹

In Hollywood films sometimes one galley smashes the oarage of another. Many classical scholars doubt that this was possible. How, after all, could a trireme perfectly navigate to within a few feet alongside another, the attacker’s rowers giving a final strong pull before yanking their oars from the water, while their vessel glided on by its adversary, knocking off the enemy’s unsuspecting oars in succession? Yet while it was no doubt a rare tactic contingent upon a skilled crew meeting up with a more poorly manned trireme, sometimes oar slicing seems to have worked. Off Mytilene in 406, for example, the Athenian admiral Conon was forced to retreat—but not before “shearing off the oars of some ships.”³⁰

Often crews resorted to grappling hooks. They were probably on board every trireme. Attackers sought to catch an enemy and pull him over for boarding, in the expectation that their own rowers could provide superior power and pull rather than be yanked instead. And if a targeted ship was damaged or some of its crew killed, it might be hooked and towed away, either toward the fleet or to friendly shores, where the crew would be captured or killed. Boarders preferred to come alongside and spear the enemy; but just as often they might jump over to the enemy and finish the business with swords.³¹

Trireme fighting became a real show. The skill of the pilots in maneuvering their triremes for hits, the cohesion of the crews in pouring on the speed in the last moments before the collision, and the explosive impact of 170 rowers smashing into their enemy counterparts—no wonder Diodorus called all that “an amazing spectacle” (kataplêktikon). Sometimes thousands of spectators lined the beaches to gaze at dozens of ships ramming, boarding, and showering each other with missiles. Soldiers were eager to watch the deadly business, rooting their respective sides on, slogging into the surf to help out, and finishing off or aiding any crews that beached their vessels. Nowhere was the grisly fighting at sea more notorious than in the Great Harbor at Syracuse. There, in a succession of sea battles, thousands of Athenians fought the Sicilians in almost every imaginable manner—ramming, boarding, missile warfare, grappling, driving ships to shore, dropping stones from cranes, and employing underwater stakes. Although the seas washed away the flotsam and jetsam of battle, at least in the immediate aftermath of a major sea fight, there could be thousands of bodies and hundreds of wrecks in the waters, while the shores were quickly made a grisly scene of bloated bodies and debris.³²

In a sea battle two years before the Peloponnesian War that broke out between the Corinthians and Corcyraeans, both sides fought in the “ancient fashion.” That is, javelin throwers and archers boarded ships and in a conflict “more like a land battle” showered the crews. The subtext of Thucydides’ description is how inferior both fleets were to the Athenian navy, which would never have allowed its ships to be grappled and boarded since their superior oarsmen could easily win a battle of maneuver and ramming.

The Spartan general Brasidas once summed up the respective naval strategies of the two fleets: Athenians relied on speed and maneuverability on the open seas to ram at will clumsier ships; in contrast, a Peloponnesian armada might win only when it fought near land in calm and confined waters, had the greater number of ships in a local theater, and if its better-trained marines on deck and hoplites on shore could turn a sea battle into a contest of infantry. A character in a contemporary comedy of Aristophanes’ says of this naval dominance, “Athens is where the good triremes come from.” Most Greeks agreed. For the Athenians, rowing was “second nature,” a skill learned “from boyhood.”³³

In the first major sea battle of the war off Naupaktos (430), Phormio with a mere 20 Athenian ships attacked and routed a larger Corinthian contingent of 47. Such superiority was to last nearly twenty years, until the disaster of Sicily weakened Athens, necessitating a crash program to rebuild ships and hire green crews. That unforeseen catastrophe prompted Sparta to renew her efforts to acquire a top-notch fleet, and thus set the stage for the last decade’s climactic deadly battles in the Aegean, which would end the war.

At some point navies began to reinforce their rams with lateral side beams designed to ensure that the heavier trireme might survive a head-on collision. Such was the case late in the war off Naupaktos, when some specialized Corinthian triremes managed to disable seven Athenian ships by ramming them head-on. Throughout the war the less skilled navies of the Peloponnesians sought such ways to nullify the advantages in Athenian seamanship: if the Corinthians were less adept at maneuvering for a more difficult broadside ram, then perhaps at the battle’s outset they could charge directly into the oncoming Athenian fleet in expectation that their heavier rams might give them the best of the collision. So while the Athenians practiced long and hard in mastering the more difficult but survivable lateral hits, their enemies counted on superior naval construction to blast ships head-on. Thucydides seems to assume as much when he reminds us that “the Corinthians considered themselves as winners if they were not decisively beaten, and in contrast the Athenians accepted that they lost if they were not clearly victorious.”³⁴

Yet throughout the war it was the Peloponnesians, not the Athenian masters of the sea, who showed themselves most adept at adopting new tactics and modifying their ships to nullify traditional Athenian superior seamanship. The Athenian tragedy in the Great Harbor at Syracuse was the story of complacence and even arrogance. The scrappy Syracusans and their Peloponnesian allies fitted out new rams to hit their more nimble enemies head-on in confined waters, as well as driving stakes into the harbor bed, chaining off the harbor entrance, and deploying stone throwers from the decks. Only at the end of the war did the Athenian admiral Conon take special measures to prepare his ships in a manner unprecedented by past fleets, apparently to ensure that his triremes were as seaworthy and reinforced as the enemy’s.

Unskilled rowers did not back their ships well. When ramming, such poorly manned triremes often stayed enmeshed in the target vessel, in the hopes that hoplites and light-armed troops could kill the enemy crews and eventually free the ship, along with its captured trophy. Sometimes the concussion of the hit knocked officers and marines overboard, given that there were no rails on the suddenly unstable deck. Such was the fate of the Spartan admiral Callicratidas, who fell off his ship at Arginusae when it was rammed in battle.³⁵

A Zero-Sum Game

Triremes were often deemed “fast” or “slow” depending on the quality of the crews, the nature of their construction, and the conditions of the hulls. In theory, newer ships, fully manned by 170 seasoned rowers, were far more nimble and faster than older triremes with leaky or waterlogged bottoms manned by rookies—a deterioration that could set in within months if boats were not allowed to dry on shore between voyages, and their hulls periodically scraped and caulked. In fact, the skill of the boatwright, the quality of the timber, and modifications in design all influenced the speed of a trireme in addition to its age and upkeep.

Still, all the criteria that made for a “fast” trireme are not clear, but it was an acknowledged fact that “the excellence of crews lasts only a short time.” After only a brief period at sea, given the likelihood of illness and physical exhaustion, there remained only a few skilled seamen who could keep a ship in steady motion and “keep the oar strokes in time.” Even within fleets on the high seas there was often a culling that went on to put the best rowers on a few select triremes that could serve as a sort of advanced flotilla to speed on ahead of the main armada. The assumption was that there were always a few rowers who were stronger or more experienced—or both—than most.

A ship’s officers were critical to its performance. Besides the trierarch (who was the official commander of the vessel) and the kybernêtês, or helmsman, who oversaw the rowers and gave orders, success hinged on the quality of the proratês (pilot) at the helm and the keleustês (rowing master), who either yelled out the rowing beat or hit stones together to keep time for the oarsmen. They were to the crew as the maestro is to the orchestra, and for much of the war Athens possessed thousands of such veterans who had crisscrossed for decades the seas of the empire.

There were several other drawbacks for such an elegant vessel, one that weighed probably little more than twenty-five tons empty, and not many more than fifty when fully manned. First, a trireme when fitted out as a pure warship could carry beside the rowers only about thirty crewmen and combatants, including marines, archers, captain, helmsman, boatswain, piper, and assorted crewmen in charge of gear, sails, and repairs. That meant that to convey any larger land forces, the 170 rowers would have to double as infantry of some sort, resulting in either oarsmen or infantrymen who were less than expert.

Alternatively, the number of rowers could be reduced, perhaps by two-thirds, and the ship essentially turned into a slow-moving troop transport or “hoplite carrier.” Usually the thranites on the top benches alone rowed, as hoplites with their heavy equipment sat in the lower two banks. To what degree a “hoplite carrier” meant that none, some, or sometimes all infantrymen helped out in the rowing is not known.

In the Athenian fleet, some 10 or so specialized triremes, with as few as 60 rowers, were used as horse transports. They could carry as many as 30 mounts for short distances if all the benches of the lower two banks were removed. A fleet of 10 such transports would have given Athens the ability to move about 300 horses in an emergency. As the conflict continued, troops of all sorts were increasingly often moved around theaters by sea. Indeed, one of the great fears of the Athenians on Sicily was the rumor that the Peloponnesians were sending sizable numbers of their best hoplites and freed helot troops on merchant ships.³⁶

So it was impossible to cheat the arithmetic of such a zero-sum game: to transport any large number of infantry, the ship would have to be so reduced of oarsmen as to make it slow and vulnerable. In contrast, retaining a full rowing crew ensured speed, but only a handful of quality infantry. To have hoplites or light-armed troops row meant that they could not be used at sea, and since they were mediocre rowers, they only hampered the optimum use of the ship. If skilled sailors were to become hoplites on landing, then the quality of the ensuing army was questionable from the start.

Because waves of three feet or so might swamp the vessels, fleets were often kept on shore in even light storms. A number of ancient commentators reflected the ancient maxim that “a sea battle could only be fought in calm waters.” Thucydides, for example, recalling the fight in the relatively quiet Corinthian Gulf between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians, remarks how the latter were sent into fatal confusion once a small wind came up and the seas grew choppy:

The vast majority of naval engagements in the Peloponnesian War took place in three or four areas of relatively protected seas: the Corinthian Gulf, the harbor at Syracuse, the strait of the Hellespont, and the protected waters between the coast of Asia Minor and the large Aegean islands right offshore. While all these regions could experience sudden choppy seas and high winds, they were at least safer than miles out in the Aegean.

There was not a single major trireme battle on the high seas in either the Mediterranean or the Aegean, in the same manner that all of history’s great sea engagements—such as Salamis, Lepanto, Trafalgar, Midway, and Leyte Gulf—were fought relatively close to either islands or the mainland. Admirals, ancient and modern, like calm seas, nearby refuge, and close ports of call. And if a sudden storm came up without warning, trireme battle ceased as crews almost immediately headed for shore; they found it impossible to ram or even navigate in choppy seas—as Alcibiades learned when he approached the Hellespont in 411 and was met with such rough water that he quit all pursuit of the Spartan fleet.³⁷

It is hard to speak in the normal sense of a true “blockade,” or even “voyage” or “patrol,” in the Peloponnesian War, since triremes could venture out for only a few hours each day. They were entirely dependent on friendly shores to provide food and water each evening. There was very little room to stow food and water in the ships, given the number of rowers and the need for spare rigging and parts. Yet almost two gallons of water was needed per man per day to prevent dehydration. How the rowers were given periodic rations and water while stationed at their benches is not known, but every captain had to berth his trireme each night someplace where fresh water was abundant. In most cases, oarsmen brought some of their own rations and stowed them near their berth. If rowers were kept too long at sea without a meal, fatigue quickly set in. The precise calculation of the effects of heat, sunlight, and lack of ventilation on the efficacy of oarage is unknown, but modern simulations suggest that a trireme’s speed could be markedly reduced if its crew was exposed to constant summer sunlight, denied refreshing breezes, and shorted on drinking water.³⁸

Common was the sudden ambush of and attack on sailors who were foraging for food, water, and firewood—especially by horsemen and light-armed troops. Indeed, provisioning was a prime reason for the Athenians’ defeat on Syracuse. Their sailors had to bivouac and search for supplies. The Syracusans, in contrast, had plenty of horses to hunt them down. The verdict of the entire war finally hinged on questions of logistics: learning very little from the disaster at Sicily, the Athenian fleet made no preparations for easy provisioning at Aegospotami and thus was ruined when Lysander surprised the crews, most of whom were off finding food.³⁹

To travel even short distances, triremes needed safe ports at intervals of fifty miles or so, where ships could find food (barley bread, onions, dried fish, meats, fruit, and olive oil), water, wine, and shelter for their crews to sleep in. Not all ports were equal. Most often ships were forced to beach on the sand or venture into streams or rivers, with sometimes disastrous results. Lamachus, for example, nine years before he was killed on Sicily, in 423 sought refuge for his small fleet of 10 Athenian triremes near Troy, in the river Cales, which flows by Heraclea. But a sudden storm came up and created such a strong current that the triremes were torn loose and completely destroyed on the rocks in a purportedly protected inland river.

Even a small fleet of some 20 to 30 triremes might entail an aggregate force of well over 5,000 crewmen—larger than most city-states in Greece—all descending on a port at once in search of food and water. If there was not careful planning, the resources of seaside communities could be overwhelmed when a fleet approached over the horizon. Most small communities did not mind the lucrative business of selling provisions to desperate sailors—as long as such suspect seamen kept clear of town and confined themselves to ad hoc markets on the beach.⁴⁰ Much of Athenian foreign policy, including its efforts to maintain an overseas empire in the Aegean, cultivate allies such as Argos and Corcyra, and establish dependencies at distant Amphipolis and Potidaea, was predicated on just the need to create permanent bases to facilitate long-distance cruises. Trireme harbors were not unlike the British Empire’s network of coaling stations throughout Africa and the Pacific to service its late-nineteenth-century global fleet.

The Limitations of Triremes

Modern Olympias found that the trireme had to be cleaned every five days or so, so bad was the smell from just the collective sweat of 170 rowers, who at least left their benches to use toilet facilities rather than relieve themselves, ancient style, in the hold of the ship. In Venetian times, returning galleys were periodically sunk in friendly harbors to rinse the hold of excrement, trash, and vermin. Few things for soldiers in the Peloponnesian War could have been as unpleasant as rowing for any length of time, given the vagaries of wind, cold, the sun, and the human miasma of 200 men crammed into such small quarters for hours on end.

Hulls became quickly soaked, waterlogged, and leaky if not periodically brought up on shore to dry.⁴¹ Frequent reference to the constant refitting of triremes in the middle of campaigns suggests that the ropes, oars, rudders, masts, and sails needed continual attention as well. The need to dry out the hull on the beach often left an entire fleet vulnerable in the late evening and early morning, should an enemy come upon the ships without warning. In one of the longest continuous deployments in Greek history, the Athenian imperial fleet of over 200 triremes was, except for brief beaching on the shores surrounding Syracuse, in the water almost constantly from the time it left the Piraeus in 415 until its final destruction in September 413 in the Great Harbor.⁴²

Even excellently maintained ships lasted only about twenty-five years. At that rate of attrition, during peacetime Athens had to build 20 craft almost every year just to maintain a fleet of 300 triremes. That optimal number had been reached during the intended Thirty Years Peace of 446–431, when Athens had not only kept up regular maintenance and replacement of its 200-ship navy, which had won the Persian War, but added another 100 triremes to its armada. The shores around the port of Athens were perennially littered with the wrecks and hulls of old triremes that were left to rot once they were beyond repair, in a continuing cycle of Athenian abandonment and building of triremes. The challenge for the Athenian maritime bureaucracy was not just that in theory 60,000 seamen—Athenian poor, some farmers, resident aliens, allied and subject rowers, freedmen, and slaves—were on call to man 300 ships, but that perhaps as many as another 10,000 to 20,000 workers were busy in the dockyards of the Piraeus building and repairing the hulls and rigging of such an enormous fleet.

The most moving story of seasonal erosion in the seaworthiness of a fleet is found in the Athenian general Nicias’ pathetic account of how quickly the once magnificent armada wore itself out on constant sea patrol outside the harbor of Syracuse, with a myriad of problems that markedly diminished its combat efficacy. “The ships,” Nicias lamented, “are waterlogged since they have been at sea for such a long time, and the crews have wasted away. The reason is that it has not been possible to drag the ships onto the shore and dry them out.” In contrast, the Syracusans inside the blockade at least could periodically maintain their hulls.⁴³

Trans-Mediterranean voyages, as were possible in the age of Venetian galleys, were almost unheard of—and when attempted, often disastrous. The Athenian fleet that headed for Sicily plotted a leapfrogging course along the Greek and Italian coastlines, inasmuch as it had to follow the shortest route across the Adriatic of some eighty-four miles from Corcyra (modern-day Corfu) over to the heel of Italy. It never contemplated plying the straight voyage from Greece to Croton (some two hundred miles), which would not have allowed any overnight stops.

Depending on winds and currents, triremes might move easily under muscular power for six to eight hours at four to five knots an hour—or a steady thirty or so strokes per minute. In rare cases, if they encountered no headwinds, ships could row even longer and cover distances of fifty to sixty nautical miles. But should a stiff wind of, say, twenty knots arise, it could almost nullify the effort of the rowers and force the vessel to shore to avoid being buffeted endlessly at sea. Superb crews and new ships on rare occasions could row for sixteen hours, and thus cover 120 miles in a day. Thucydides records the singular achievement of a messenger ship dispatched to Mytilene that made it from the Piraeus to Lesbos (184 miles) in twenty-four hours, at a clip of almost eight nautical miles per hour. Yet this feat of rowing across the Aegean by an elite crew in one bold stroke was clearly exceptional. In fleets of 70 to 100 ships, the armada usually had to move at the speed of the slowest ships in order to maintain formation. And pilots had to be careful not to wear out their crews prematurely; sometimes overzealous pursuit could result in exhausted seamen, who in turn could not maintain formation and thus fell victim to an opportunistic enemy counterattack. Pacing a trireme’s oarsmen was critical, since any warship with worn-out rowers was left for several minutes essentially dead and helpless in the water, entirely dependent on wind to sail away to safety—and not even that recourse was possible if the rigging had been left on shore in expectation of battle.⁴⁴

There is also no recorded instance of “power cruising,” in which sails and oars were used simultaneously—perhaps because of the near impossibility of coordinating the rowers’ strokes with the unpredictable breezes. Any winds approaching fifteen knots would require ships to pull down their sails and head for shore to keep an even keel and avoid seas splashing into the lower oar holes or over the sides. In most cases, ships sailed whenever possible under wind power at a slow clip of about three to four knots, from port to port. Triremes then usually relied on oarage only when heading out to battle, when masts and sails were either stowed or more likely left behind on land.

Naval warfare in the Peloponnesian War, however, was not merely subject to the limitations of these fragile oared ships at sea. The construction of triremes was also costly, usually requiring the equivalent of some 6,000 man-days of labor. For a state like Athens to launch a fleet of 300 triremes consumed about the same outlay as outfitting an enormous hoplite army of 18,000 with full armor. But even that is a facile comparison: hoplites usually bought their own panoplies, and marched to battle and back within a few days, thus requiring little further logistical expense from the state.

Each trireme, in contrast, cost one talent for construction and another talent of both private and public expenditure per month to keep afloat. If Athens had on average two-thirds of her ships at sea for the 240 days during the eight sailing months, from March through October, these 200 ships might in theory cost the city 1,600 talents, or more than twice the entire annual tribute from the empire. That cost was unsustainable for more than a year or two. To wage a multifaceted naval war, in which such a sizable fleet went out on annual patrol for some twenty-seven years from Sicily to Corcyra to the Aegean and Ionia, could have cost over 43,000 talents, seven times the entire financial reserves of Athens at the beginning of the war and more than its aggregate imperial income over some three decades. Did the empire exist to provide a navy or did the navy create the empire—or both?

Wealthy Versus Poor

The trierarchs on board also took on some of the expenditures for maintenance. Thus a large part of the state’s military budget was covered by private contributions that did not figure in the state’s fiscal accounting, explaining why the fleet could cost more than the income of the city. Perhaps more than half of all Athens’ expenses came from the forced donations of wealthy citizens. In that context of skyrocketing naval costs, exacerbated by catastrophic defeats at sea at Sicily and Aegospotami, it was natural that reactionaries in both the revolutions of 411 and 404 sought to curtail the power of the naval lobby and seek some type of peace with Sparta. When, after 413, the landed elite were often barred from their own estates in Attica, insult was added to injury by asking them to pay to replace a fleet lost eight hundred miles away, one that would do nothing to protect the soil of the city-state from Spartan ravagers a few miles off.

So the war quite literally was bankrupting the rich conservatives of Athens, who paid to employ the poor for what seemed like a perpetual war that devoured hundreds of Athenian triremes. These revolutionary movements at home in some sense could mark the most important events of the war: should Athens, the beacon of democracy and the font of imperial aid to radical egalitarians throughout the Aegean, “flip” and become oligarchic, there would be no ideological basis for an empire at all, at least one that professed its reason to be the protection of the “people” from coercive elites. Such radical change later on was always the hope of rightists like Plato, for example, who felt that the moral decline of the city had begun with Themistocles’ creation of a navy and the diminution of hoplite warfare—a process accelerated by the Peloponnesian War and only to be curtailed through revolution.⁴⁵

Yet the financial challenge was not just building ships and paying crews. There was also an enormous investment required in dockyards and ship sheds as well. Since the materials for construction had to be imported (mostly from northwestern Greece), stored, and protected from the elements, a veritable arsenal at the Piraeus—almost two millennia before the extravagant galley factory at Venice—was constructed to launch and repair ships. There was nothing like it in the ancient world; and the inventory of ship parts and the sophistication of its arsenals explain why Athens alone of the city-states could build and maintain a fleet of 300 seaworthy triremes. Long-term maintenance involved thorough cleaning of the planks beneath the waterline of ships, which quickly became encrusted with marine life, waterlogged, and worm-eaten. To keep an expensive trireme afloat for some twenty years meant that it had to be drawn up on land and protected in a covered shed, where maintenance work on the delicate craft was nearly constant.

A Precious Investment

The fastest vessels were probably built of silver fir, or in some cases of either pine or cedar, lighter materials that lacked the strength and resiliency of the occasionally employed hardwoods like oak. Modern reconstruction has also revealed how quickly the multitude of a trireme’s intricate parts can break. Olympias was no quicker put to sea than immediate maintenance and repair were needed. Just assembling some 300 to 400 triremes in one place, as happened in the last gigantic battles of the Peloponnesian War, was an amazing feat of logistics, as thousands rowed on fragile and temperamental craft across the Aegean without sure provisions, navigation, or any real sense of meteorology.⁴⁶

The chief problem in trireme warfare, however, was always manpower. In theory, Athens itself had over 20,000 thetes who would customarily row. But that number could man only a hundred or so ships, even if every citizen left municipal employment or his own private job to serve for months in the Athenian fleet. So to man an imperial fleet of 200 to 300 triremes, tens of thousands of rowers were needed from subject states in the Aegean, along with resident aliens and on many occasions thousands of slaves, if not off-season farmworkers. Toward the end of the war, after tens of thousands were lost to the plague and at Sicily, non-Athenians may have made up as much as 20 to 30 percent of some of the crews. To pay for such a horde was one thing; to lose it at sea was catastrophic, weakening the very stability of the empire.

Unlike hoplite battle, which was rarely ruinous—the average fatalities in such land engagements were usually around 10 to 15 percent of the combined forces—naval warfare held the potential to take out a city’s entire fleet and its enormous human investment in a single clash. Besides the disaster at Sicily, the numbers involved in battles on the eve of and during the Peloponnesian War were staggering: Sybota (433): 300 ships, 60,000 seamen; Cynossema (411): 162 ships, 33,000 seamen; Arginusae (411): 263 ships, 55,000 seamen; and Aegospotami (404): more than 300 ships and 60,000 seamen. So such losses at sea could in theory nearly bring down an entire state in a few hours. The 216 ships, 45,000 men, and perhaps over 3,000 talents in wages, capital investment, and provisions that were lost in the two armadas sent to Sicily changed the course of the war, representing as it did a sum almost the equivalent of the city’s entire financial reserves present on the eve of the hostilities, capital acquired through some fifty years of empire. The Athenian disaster at Aegospotami almost a decade later immediately brought the war to a head in late 405, once a depleted Athens had gambled on putting to sea its last reserves of 180 ships with 36,000 men. In not more than an hour or so they lost 170 ships and the vast majority of the crewmen, who were either killed, captured, or scattered throughout the Hellespont. Aegospotami was a one-day financial disaster of some 400 talents alone in lost capital and wages—and the added expense of lost thousands of man-hours of labor, both military and civilian, for years to come.

The Advantage of Sea Power

Given the dangers and the horrendous costs of trireme warfare, why fight at sea at all? Thucydides apparently felt it necessary to explain in rather explicit terms why ships were so valuable. He starts his history off with a lesson about the early Greek thalassacracies (“sea powers”). And his long account of the war abruptly ends nearly in mid-sentence hundreds of pages later, with the Athenian victory at Cynossema in 411. Thematic throughout is his belief that money, walls, and ships represented a new horizon in warfare, one not envisioned until the rise of powerful maritime states. Their commerce and strong central government emerged in the half century of prosperity after the Persian War, and alone could fuel sufficient manpower and capital to create real navies. Yet did the Peloponnesian War prove Thucydides right about the advantages of sea power? Prewar Sparta, after all, at far less cost had created a system of land alliances in the Peloponnese that rivaled the power of Athens.

True, late-fourth-century Sparta managed to maintain a large fleet; but it was still eventually emasculated only by Theban spearmen, not rowers. In general, throughout history, one can count on one hand the world’s formidable commanders—Themistocles, Don John of Austria, Nelson, Jones, Nimitz—in contrast to dozens of great captains like Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Genghis Khan, Saladin, Cortés, Napoleon, Wellington, Grant, Rommel, and Patton. Entire wars—the Second Punic War, the Crusades, the American Revolutionary and Civil Wars, the western fronts in both World War I and World War II—have been fought mostly without decisive sea battles. People, after all, live on land, not water; most food is grown in the soil, not the sea; and men need not build vessels to fight on the ground. Victorian England could blockade imperial Germany; but victory was possible only with the destruction of the formidable German army. In turn, Germany probably could have won both world wars on the Continent without defeating the British fleet. The Soviet Union was kept alive by the American and British merchant marines, but the battles that broke the Third Reich on the eastern front were all fought on land.

Why then do states, ancient and modern, if they are to be great and imperial, look to the sea? The dilemma of ships versus infantry is best resolved not in an either- or proposition but, rather, in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. In a strictly military sense, did building and maintaining a large fleet bring advantages to justify the enormous human and material investment, as well as the risk of losing such aggregate capital in a single bad day? Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler might argue otherwise; their power, after all, was created and maintained by infantry forces largely acting alone against like armies. But then the latter two eventually came to ruin, and the former often won only through maritime support and transport.

At the most basic level, ships gave to a state a vast array of alternatives, both military and economic. With the addition of a potential fleet of more than 200 active and 100 reserve ships, Athens found that within a three-hundred-mile radius it could unite, or rather coerce, nearly two hundred Greek states—perhaps comprising almost a million people, and all reachable by a fleet of triremes in a little over three or four days. Island states that had surrendered their navies, unlike land powers, were easily kept separate and isolated, and had no mechanisms for uniting. In turn, their imperial ruler could coerce all piecemeal with its magnificent fleet, making a maritime empire easier to control than its landed counterpart. It was a difficult task to cut off and surround a landlocked city, but not so much an island, which could be blockaded and separated from trade, commerce, and help.⁴⁷

Athens alone of Greek states had the ability to reach even farther abroad, to additional millions of Mediterranean peoples in Cyprus, Egypt, southern Russia, Italy, and Sicily, in much the same manner that tiny sixteenth-century Venice was enriched by scores of trading outposts in the eastern Mediterranean. But what is meant by “reach”? Perhaps that maritime commerce was possible only through the presence of warships that could protect merchant ships from pirates and hostile powers and provide a degree of coercion to establish favorite trading relationships. Out of such free, safe trade arose an Aegean economy that was integrated through constant export and import of goods—and humans as well.

The Piraeus, and the Long Walls that linked it to the city, became almost a secular religious entity in Athenian thinking. Throughout the war there was a paranoid fixation on the harbor’s safety, this vital emporium of the empire in the Aegean. Thucydides once remarked that an aborted Peloponnesian attack against the Piraeus created among Athenians “a panic as great as any throughout the war.”⁴⁸ Aristophanes used almost reverential tones to describe the chaos at the port when the Athenian fleet made ready to sail: captains shouting, money being paid, ships’ figureheads being gilded, food and water being carried on board, farewell parties, fistfights, and last-minute repairs. An anonymous conservative Athenian critic, sometimes called the “Old Oligarch,” hated his city’s naval power and the democratic culture it fostered, but then waxed eloquent about how it ensured a lucrative trade and vibrancy unmatched in the Greek world.⁴⁹

Thus, the Athenians realized that such fortifications were the linchpin of an entire way of democratic and prosperous life. Despite having their fleet wiped out, facing famine, and with the Spartans camped outside the walls and demanding surrender, the Athenian assembly nevertheless initially made it a crime for any Athenian citizen to agree to Spartan armistice demands to tear down large sections of the Long Walls—and, with them, the real and symbolic guarantor of the entire idea of radical Athenian democracy.⁵⁰

Militarily, maritime Athens could do more than landlocked Sparta: send troops to Pylos, raid the coast of the Peloponnese, supply a sustained war in northwestern Greece, put down revolts on the island of Lesbos, and blockade rebellious cities on the shores of the Chalcidice. As Pericles put it, sea power could not be compared to “the use of houses or agricultural land.” Rather, it represented a strength altogether different, something unrivaled that gave Athenians the freedom to go wherever they pleased, one matched by neither the king of Persia nor by “any other nations of those now on earth.” What he meant by such majestic rhetoric was that the Athenian fleet allowed the city to achieve numerical superiority in almost any local theater without the muster of a huge, ponderous land army of the type that had lumbered into Attica in the first decade of the war.

Athenian maritime flexibility, coupled with the protection of the city proper offered by the Long Walls, was the theme of almost all of Pericles’ speeches outlining Athenian wartime strategy. At the very beginning of the war, the Athenians thought that by winning over neighboring states and gaining key islands off the coast of the Peloponnese—Cythera, Cephallenia, and Zacynthus—“they might encircle the Peloponnese and conquer it.”

In addition, food, supplies, weapons, and troops themselves—all these could be transported by sea at a fraction of the cost of land support. Other than helot attendants, the Spartan army essentially had no “lift” capability whatsoever, and could operate abroad only to the degree that it could bring along a few days’ supply of food and scrounge the rest from the surrounding countryside. The Greeks deprecated the Spartan ability to conduct sieges, but inherent in that perceived weakness was their inferiority in ships, inasmuch as assaults were most often conducted against port cities. Nor was Greece a Mesopotamia or Nile Valley, where overland travel entailed level marches on well-watered ground; rather, it was a mountainous and often inhospitable country, and even today some of its mountainous coastal communities are accessible only by sea. King Agis moved against Athens from the Spartan base at Decelea only when Lysander’s triremes were in its harbor. Land powers could fight each other without warring at sea. Thebes and Sparta, for example, would later do just that for nearly thirty years during the first half of the fourth century. But they could make little headway on land against a sea power with urban fortifications.

The Burdens of the Athenian Navy

Only when warfare turned into a true transcontinental enterprise did the value of plentiful triremes diminish somewhat. For example, in the fourth century, after the loss of empire and tribute, the Athenian fleet reached its greatest size ever, 400 triremes by 300 B.C. But in a world where the new composite army of Alexander—heavy cavalry, missile troops, phalangites, and sophisticated logistics—was designed to march thousands of miles into the interior of the Persian Empire, the old parochial harbors and choke points of the city-states became irrelevant and, with them, the value of triremes themselves.

Even in the heyday of the fifth-century trireme, naval superiority came at a cost. The expense could nearly bankrupt a maritime state in a few seasons, as the British almost learned at the beginning of the twentieth century and the Russians discovered at its end. During some years Athens sent out between 200 and 250 triremes at once, and the expense nearly exhausted the state.⁵¹ The single naval catastrophe at Egypt in 454, a nightmare where at least 100 triremes were lost and, with them, in theory as many as 20,000 imperial sailors and support troops, sent aftershocks throughout the Athenian empire. The destruction of so many ships and men so quickly probably explains why in the disaster’s aftermath the Delian treasury was moved for safekeeping to Athens, the land war on the mainland was curtailed, the empire in the Aegean was tightened up, and peace feelers were extended to Persia.⁵²

The philosophers weighed in negatively against the social effects of sea power. A disgusted Plato scoffed that the sea was a “bad neighbor” and that the glorious victory at Salamis, which had started it all, made the Athenians “worse.” It would have been better, he huffed, to send Athenian youths to the mythical Cretan Minotaur than for the city to find its autonomy and safety through a hated armada! Aristotle also could not deny the value of navies, but he urged that the seamen be kept away from the city, quarantined in an apartheid existence in a secluded port, to preclude the mongrelization of society that maritime life ensured. How insidious was a city built on sea power: paying its slaves to row, offering them freedom after victory, empowering the poor. The chaotic result, according to such abstract critics, was that a proper gentleman walking along an Athenian street could not distinguish a free man from his servant, much less expect a slave to step out of his way!⁵³

Yet in the end it seems incredible that Athens could build and lose at least two entire fleets, pass up at least three Spartan entreaties for peace, and press on with the war for twenty-seven years. But it was not just the defeat of Athens that was at stake. Rather, for 20,000 poor Athenians, half the city’s citizenry at war’s outbreak, victory meant freedom and prosperity, while defeat was thought by many to presage a return to powerless existence under a hated landed oligarchy. Poor people, not reactionary elite horsemen or conservative yeomen farmers, wanted the Peloponnesian War, and the assurance that their bulwark of radical democracy, an imperial fleet, and an empire of tribute-paying democratic subject states would be the future of Greece. Accordingly, the last decade of sea fighting was so violent and savage precisely because hundreds of thousands of poor Greeks, in places like Byzantium, Chios, and Samos, now understood that they would either continue to vote under the aegis of an often stern Athenian imperialism or, with Athens’ defeat, be forced to accept oligarchic rule.

The wealthy in Athens felt that they had only so much capital that could be taxed. Despite the riches generated by state-owned silver mines, additional income from abroad was needed if the triremes were to stay afloat. By the second or third year of the war, the city was already nearing financial insolvency as a result of constant patrolling around the Peloponnese. In response, measures were taken to increase tribute and imperial revenue as early as 428. But with continual naval action off Sicily, Melos, and Mytilene, by 426 the costs of triremes grew voracious. The old prewar annual assessment on some 200 imperial subjects had been around 500 to 600 talents, as Athens was a protection racket that billed its clients for the cost of providing their own security. Yet by just the fourth year of the war, the assessment had skyrocketed to 800 talents.

After all, if 200 ships were, in theory, in service for eight months a year and thus could consume almost 2,000 talents to outfit and man, even more tribute was required. By 425 the imperial levy soared to somewhere between 1,200 and 1,300 talents. And still the hungry triremes of Athens were short of money. A city that had once engaged in a twenty-year conundrum over the excessive cost of 1,000 talents for temples on the Acropolis was consuming more than that expense every year and showing very little progress in the war for all the sacrifice.

All that futile expense was to change in the last decade of the war, when Sparta at last came out to meet the Athenians at sea. More Greeks would fight and die in the Aegean after 411 than had during all the battles of the first two decades of the conflict, as the combatants finally agreed to meet each other in decisive battles and settle the war for good.⁵⁴