“Few Out of Many Returned”
Theaters of Naval Disaster in Ancient Athens
Part 1

Konstantinos Volanakis, Naval Battle of Salamis (1882)

3,611 words

Part 1 of 4 (Part 2 here)

Six victorious generals, including the son of Athens’ greatest statesman, Pericles, made their way to the dais of ancient Athens’ public Assembly over 2,400 years ago. The atmosphere was electric. Passion flushed the cheeks of all who gathered there to witness the conquering heroes take center stage. Stories about the successful engagement were on every man’s lips. Some weeks prior and near the tiny Aegean island of Arginusae, the generals had pulled off a miracle. Their rag-tag fleet had won a naval battle against the more numerous and experienced Peloponnesian armada — a triumph that had saved the faltering democracy from ruin.

Had the audience come to cheer the generals’ homecoming, shower them with poetic praises, increase their titles, crown them with olive wreaths, or vow to inscribe their deeds upon a newly-commissioned statue of Nike? No. Instead, and at this dire juncture in Athenian military prospects, the citizens of Athens had come to vote on whether or not these six commanders should be put to death. Shouts in favor of capital punishment overwhelmed those urging restraint. The next thing the accused knew, a group of officials whisked all six of them out of the auditorium and to the place of their execution. Within the hour, their souls belonged to Hades. The decision left Athens virtually devoid of competent war leadership, and regret swiftly followed. It was one of those historical episodes that belies the modern idea that democracies are inherently less bloodthirsty, or vengeful, and that people will always act in their material self-interest. Thus, scholars have struggled to explain the foolishness that led to the tragic Arginusae affair.

The point of contention that had incited the murderous emotions of Athens’ people to such a degree that it caused them to execute valuable city-servants was the fact that these generals had failed to recover the many bodies of Athenian dead and wounded from the waters surrounding Arginusae. After the battle, a violent storm had blown in, cracking with thunder and the sharp Saharan whips of sirocco winds. Dangerously choppy waters had made all attempts to rescue the several thousand survivors and dead sailors impossible. Nevertheless, the victors reasoned, their native city would be thrilled at the victory. Indeed, it was with great nervous anticipation that the Athenian civilians had waited for news of the battle’s outcome. Had their beloved navy managed to ransom their fate; or, even now as its people offered prayers and sacrifices at its altars, was the Peloponnesian fleet on its way to sack and enslave the city of Athens? When word finally arrived, initial euphoria darkened into rage. The generals had achieved an improbable success, but more importantly, it seemed, they had failed their fellow citizens, and now they had to answer for their negligence (and for the uncooperative weather, apparently). Give me victory and death, Assembly voters perversely told the condemned. Predictably, the fall of Athens followed close behind. In 404 BC, after 27 years of subjecting virtue to a thousand shameful deaths, the city surrendered to her enemies.

The central question is why. Why did the Athenians act against their own interests and kill six of their generals (eight, if they’d had their way)?^[1] Was there more going on than simply outrage at aborted recovery attempts? The impulsiveness and violent mob-mentality that have often characterized pure democracies such as ancient Athens are tendencies that many people have cited as the reason (although these were more symptomatic than causal) — but can we explain this episode in a way that deepens, or goes beyond the obvious arguments? By examining the navy, literary plots, and the philosophical paradox of fate and choice in the context of fifth-century BC Athens, we can. During that era, Athenians weathered the crests and troughs of launch, stasis, and subsequent calls for retribution that plunged their city-state from preeminence to defeat. By 406 BC, the date of the Arginusae debacle and 25 years after the Peloponnesian War had begun, its citizens had become “sea-sick.” The tossing waves of war, fate, and blunders of their own making had exhausted them.

On the floor of the Assembly, this queasy limbo of spectatorship that always afflicts wartime civilians, finally resulted in their irrational decision to wipe out the few remaining leaders who might have been capable of saving them. Each of the following sections pairs a contemporary Greek play with a pivotal Athenian naval battle and concludes, using these insights, with the Arginusae episode. When these stories are seen together, a pattern emerges that helps to answer the most troubling mystery of the golden Greek Century: Why did the generals have to die?

I. “The Long Stretch of Time, the Accounting of Days”: Salamis and The Persians

The greatest Greek century^[2] began after a (more or less) unified Greece defeated two richly-appointed and numerically vast Persian armies. In 480 BC the Achaemenid king Xerxes, son of the Persian ruler Darius, who’d made the first attempt to subjugate mainland Greece,^[3] began making his way toward the West at the head of a massive invasion force. A wild-eyed and waiting Greece sought out the advice of its oracles. Athens — that democratic city-state whose entire system rested on the power of free choice and the belief in human agency (i.e., the practice of voting) — put their hopes in Fate and the gods’ will . . . sort of. Envoys trekked to Delphi for the purpose of asking Apollo’s intercessors what their city should do as they faced imminent peril. In a rare instance of clarity, the Oracle’s priestess recited to them:

Why sit so idle, you poor wretched men?
To the ends of the land you should flee.
Leave your homes, leave the heights of your circular fortress, [for] . . .
Ares [comes] sharp on the heels of a Syrian chariot
And he will destroy many cities . . .
And into the devouring fire he will give the temples . . .
Which now drip with sweat and shake in their fear
As blood gushes darkly from the tops of their roofs,
Foreseeing the force of compelling disaster.
Now step out of this shrine, and shroud over your heart with the evils to come.^[4]

We can imagine the horror on the faces of these ambassadors and the countrymen to whom they repeated this message — evil tidings that surpassed their worst nightmares. But if nothing else, the Athenians were excellent on the rebound. Quickly collecting themselves, they dispatched another delegation to the Oracle, this time as humbler “suppliants” bearing olive branches (and most likely a considerable donation). They pleaded, “Lord, deliver to us a better oracle concerning our fatherland out of respect for these branches which we carry . . . or else we shall not leave your shrine but shall remain here until we die.”

At the long-term prospect of having to host a malcontented group of Greek picketers, the Delphic authorities agreed to give them a revised prophecy. This time, the priestess answered them:

Now to you once again my word I shall speak, making it adamantine:
. . . a wall made of wood does farsighted Zeus . . . grant
. . . to help you and your children.
Do not await . . . the horse and the foot,
The army gigantic that comes from the mainland;
Withdraw, turn your backs, though someday you still will meet face to face.
O Salamis Divine, the children of women you will yet destroy . . . ^[5]

This was less clear, but also less fearsome, and the men duly wrote down these words and brought them back to Athens. Professional interpreters claimed that the verse prophesied a Greek disaster at sea, hence the last line’s warning that many men would be killed off the coast of Salamis. Once again, Athenians chose to defy the “experts.” A prominent commander named Themistocles argued that the interpreters were wrong. Though the final line seemed to be a warning to the Greeks, it was really a warning to the Persians. Zeus had decreed that Xerxes’ ships would be destroyed, and that many a Persian mother would mourn her son, dead in a distant bay. Unknown to these women as yet, the name of “Salamis” would echo as a collective lament across every steppe and luxuriantly gilt capital of Asia. Likewise, the saving “wall made of wood” did not refer to fortifications alone, the Athenians decided, but to their trireme ships. They should not wait for the allied Greek “horse and the foot” to arrive from the Pelopponese. Against the threat of Persian slavery, they could not delay. They needed a naval victory, and fast.

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The entire episode was an example of a simultaneous belief in a destiny controlled by the gods and the power of human action, specifically couched in terms of sea and ship. In old hymns, the Greeks appealed to the deities whose bourn was the ocean, for they realized that no mortal could tame the “unfathomable sea.” On divinities such as Leukothea^[6] they entrusted their lives as they sailed amidst “the unsteady heave” of the Mediterranean, for “[she] alone save[d] men from wretched death at sea.” Fishermen who braved “the gusty gray” swells prayed to her, that she might grant them “a great haul of fish,” all the while knowing that she could “just as easily [take] it away, if her spirit so wishe[ed].”^[7] But next to this insecurity was the equal Greek faith in man-made and man-powered ships, the very manifestation of human will and the desire to overcome the natural limits that the gods imposed on him. Even as the Hellenes tried to divine the gods’ designs, they sought to shape it through their own devices and ingenuity. Both views were central components of Greek and especially Athenian character.

The Trireme

Indeed, the sea-faring Athenians had long valued these mobile “walls made of wood” for trade; mastering them for use in war was natural. The trireme was an engineering marvel, and until recently, scholars could only guess at its internal structure. Joined by the Greek navy in the 1980s, the British and American Trireme Trust managed to build the first trireme (Olympias) since ancient times. It was the kind of project that white people, given their unique combination of romantic imagination and empirical curiosity, have always loved to take on; they see the intrinsic value of beautiful and historical things that have no practical use beyond fulfilling our desire to know. Thanks to this research and reconstruction, we now realize that these ships were roughly 120 feet long by 15 or 16 feet across. They had three tiers of rowers placed diagonally and staggered down from one another. The top rowers were called thranitai, below them sat the zygioi, and at the bottom were the thalamioi.^[8] The quality of their conditions worsened correspondingly. The thranitai enjoyed the best wages, coolest breezes, and overall view, while the third-rung thalamians rowed in the most squalid conditions. The water-line lay just below their oar-openings. They could not see outside, and little fresh air or wind could have revived them during their exhausting work. Of course, the human body needs lots of water in order to perform strenuous labor, and most of this water the oarsmen sweated off as they plied the Aegean. There in the dark and airless hold, the thalamioi rowed, soaked in their own sweat and the sweat of 100 other rowers above them. But there were other, worse horrors besides the slick of constant perspiration.

The reconstructed trireme Olympias (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

In Aristophanes’ comedy The Frogs, a character lists the things that sailors excelled at, among them: “break[ing] wind in a thalamian’s face and foul[ing] his mess-mate with dung.” In the same play, the god Dionysis delivered another graphic account of life on the rowing bench. As he paddled Charon’s boat across the Styx, Dionysis whined, “I’ve got blisters, and my bottom has been oozing for a while now.”^[9] In order to prevent such “blisters” on his derriere, an ancient rower had to sit on a cushion that he provided for himself. Other troubles simply had to be endured. There were no bathrooms on board an ancient trireme. Men relieved themselves from the (dis)comfort of their own seats. Although the modern Olympias hasn’t had this particular problem, its trial runs have revealed that after three or four days, accumulated sweat grown stale and rancid in the holds of triremes would have reeked so badly that rowing could hardly have continued until crewmen scrubbed them down. The ancients had a better tolerance for bad smells, but even so, it would have been miserable.

Rowing a trireme required more than brute strength, stamina, and an ability to handle nastiness. Even the expert rowers recruited for the Olympias project found it challenging to row in time with close to 200 other men. If a single rower’s movement was off, it could disrupt the rhythm of the entire vessel. In the heat of battle, or when navigating choppy waters, it would have required a collective, nearly superhuman mastery rivaling any calm discipline necessary for the intricate foot formations used in the gunpowder age. A shipmaster helped keep time by knocking two stones together; rowers kept a steadfast silence in order to hear and concentrate on this beat. It was like playing an instrument that required conducted perfection from scores of players in order to produce a single clear note, or stroke. In the words of one Olympias sailor, “it is hard to imagine any other activity in the ancient world, and perhaps in the modern, which has required the simultaneous exercise of such a high level of skill from so large a group of people.”^[10] Honing one’s rowing fitness left time for few other pursuits.

Trireme sailors also avoided long stretches of open water and hugged the coastlines, or island-hopped to their destinations as much as possible. The distances from Greece to Ionia, or from island to island in the Aegean may not seem far to us, but to ancient rowing crews, they were great indeed. Getting caught in the middle of the sea, and then hit by a storm or other hazard was a death sentence. Crews used their masts and sails during travel in favorable weather, but would typically beach them before an anticipated battle. Maintaining the lightest weights possible was key, and battle triremes did not carry stores of food and weaponry, for the ship itself was the main weapon in naval warfare.

Trireme battles were wild, shockingly brutal bar fights — only they were fought on the high seas and with hundreds of huge battering rams smashing through enemy (and sometimes friendly) hulls, left and right. These episodes often killed more people than battles fought on land. In significant engagements of 200 or 300 triremes, there would have totaled about 50,000 combatants, or the “equivalent of a large Greek city.” The cacophonous melee featured men “hurling missiles, rowing, boarding, clinging to wreckage, and swimming to [safety].”^[11] Using swinging feints, or flanking maneuvers, triremes attempted to throw their enemies into confusion, then shatter their sides and unprotected “bellies.” Rammed ships were setting ducks. A dozen or so armed hoplites could then board these wounded craft, and skewer enemy crews with arrows and spears, or hack them to death with short swords. Nearly naked oarsmen were defenseless against such attacks. Which problem was worse: the armed soldiers slashing their way through the interior benches, or the fact that drowning might only be moments away?

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Indeed, the Greek Navy managed to perform a complete disembarkment of Olympias’ 180 sailors in under 30 seconds, but this was an evacuation carried out in ideal circumstances; the ship wasn’t sinking, none of its men were wounded, nor were enemies weren’t ramming the hull or throwing lethal projectiles at panicked sailors. The ancient reality was far different. As the wrecked ships took on more seawater and began to go under, crewmen — particularly the thalamioi stuck below –found it difficult to abandon ship. After the fighting subsided, debris littered the sea in sickening swirls of splintered wood and flesh. Thousands of men, hundreds of ships, and an ungodly amount of wealth tied up in both could forever sink in a single day of bad luck, or poor planning, the hopes of an entire campaign.

Despite the dangers, many Athenians signed on with enthusiasm. Athens drew its rowers from the urban middling or lower sorts, and the majority of them were citizens rather than slaves. Belonging to the navy meant belonging to a brotherhood. It earned them prestige, decent pay, and imparted a feeling of patriotism that follows from collective civic participation. For the Athenians, the trireme was an extension of their democracy. Unlike the Persians, who often used whipped thralls in their galleys, Athenians crewed their fleets with proud citizen-sailors sans the lash. The manner in which they operated their navy was but one example that differentiated them from their Eastern nemeses.

The Nemesis

More than ever, the Hellenes of fifth-century Greece defined themselves in opposition to the East, and against the Persian Empire in particular. A few of Herodotus’ tales about a King who inflicted unreasonable demands on his slave-subjects were instructive.

On his way to invade Greece (the second time for Persia in as many decades), Xerxes gathered his large force from all corners of “populous Asia.” Along the road, he stopped in the Lydian city of Sardis. Pythios, the ruler of Sardis, spared no expense on food and festivities. Xerxes was very pleased. The King of Kings’ sunny mood gave Pythios the confidence he needed to ask his liege for a boon: “Sire, I pray to the utmost high that you shall grind into their own soil the bloody noses of subjugated Greeks — I only ask that you spare my eldest son from your campaign, as he is set to take my place and to care for me in my dotage. The other four sons I happily give and are even now marching with your army.”

In a case of near-instantaneous regret at his words, Pythoios watched Xerxes’ brow darken with the storm clouds of Ahura Mazdā: “You despicable wretch!” he thundered.

How dare you even mention your own son when you are my slave and . . . while I myself am marching with all my sons, brothers, servants, and friends? . . . Mark my words — though you have rendered good services, it is nigh undone . . . Your hospitality will save you and four of your sons, but that one son to whom you cling the most shall forfeit his life.

Xerxes sent assassins to find the eldest child of unlucky Pythios, then cut the young man in two, and “placed one half of the body on the right side of the road and the other half on the left, so that the army would march between them.”^[12] In Herodotus, creative cruelty characterized “the East.” Individual lives were of lesser value to many of the “Orientals,” or “barbarians,” as he put it.

After leaving Sardis and “marching between” the halved corpse, Xerxes followed the road to the Bosphorus. There, he seized another opportunity to exercise his extravagant villainy. Like his father, Darius, Xerxes confronted the narrow channel of the Hellespont that blocked his striped and polka-dotted force from entering Europe. He ordered his enormous fleet of ships to line up single file across the expanse, so that engineers could fashion a pontoon bridge that stretched all the way to Balkan shores. They had nearly completed their work when a great storm blew in with the Furies, and overnight the bridge broke apart. Once again, Xerxes lost his temper. The King “ordered that the Hellespont . . . receive 300 lashes under the whip, and that a pair of shackles was to be dropped into the sea.” Herodotus claimed that he went so far as to sear the Hellespont with a brand of iron. As Xerxes’ enforcers meted out these “punishments,” he instructed them to shout continuous “barbarian and insolent” abuse at the water: “Bitter [trench], your master is imposing this penalty upon you for wronging him’”; “‘King Xerxes will cross you whether you like it or not’”; “after all, ‘it is for just cause . . . that no human offers you sacrifice: you are a turbid and briny river!’”^[13] The King followed up this show of spite by (perhaps even more unproductively) demanding that all of his bridge supervisors lose their employment in the traditional Persian manner — that is to say, he had them beheaded.

Xerxes orders the scourging of the sea (illustration from a 1909 print reproduced at Wikipedia)

Nevertheless, the Persian army eventually finished the bridge and crossed the Hellespont, leaving Asia behind for prospects of victory in a distant, hostile land. It was at this moment that the oldest extant play in Western history began.

Notes

^[1] Two of the accused generals refused the city summons and chose exile over what they correctly believed would be harsh punishment.

^[2] As a lifelong admirer of the Hellenes, ancient and modern, I hope there will be an even greater Greek century to come.

^[3] Darius I of Persia attempted an invasion of Greece in 492 BC; a decisive Greek victory at Marathon in 490 BC ended the Persian campaign.

^[4] Herodotus, The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, trans. Robert Strassler (New York: Anchor Books, 1998), 554.

^[5] Ibid., 554-55.

^[6] A sea-goddess predating the Olympians, and in later Greek mythology, turned into a nymph.

^[7] Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Michael Huemann (Creative Commons, 2021), 18.

^[8] For more on the Olympias project and trials, see J. S. Morrison, J. F. Coates, and N. B. Rankov’s The Athenian Trireme: The History and Reconstruction of an Ancient Greek Warship (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

^[9] Aristophanes, The Frogs, trans. Debra Hamel, 1074-75, 236-239.

^[10] Boris Rankov, “Rowing Olympias: A Matter of Skill” as quoted from Debra Hamel’s The Battle of Arginusae (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2015), 20.

^[11] Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (New York: Random House, 2005), 314.

^[12] The Histories, 514.

^[13] Ibid., 512.