The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (23 page)

According to some accounts, at the time of his death Alexander was considering a Mediterranean campaign against Carthage. Given his relatively limited experience of naval warfare—as distinct from his grasp of the essential strategic considerations—it is difficult to imagine the results of a full-fledged naval contest. The year after his death, a Macedonian fleet crushed an Athenian effort to overthrow Macedonian rule at Amorgos, in the
Cyclades, a battle that signaled the end of Athenian power as decisively as Salamis had heralded its beginning 250 years before. Yet Alexander would have met considerable opposition not only from the Carthaginians, then at the height of their power and influence, but also from the Greeks of
Magna Graecia and Sicily. The latter had not played a major role in the
Persian Wars of the preceding century, and to the Athenians and others they were conspicuous by their absence. Even as
Themistocles was arguing for a two-hundred-ship navy for Athens,
Gelon, tyrant of the Sicilian city-state of
Syracuse, already had one. When a mainland embassy requested his help, he agreed with the proviso that he be given overall command of the Greek forces. He may have attached this unrealistic condition to ensure that he would be refused, thus giving him an honorable way out and allowing him to concentrate on a looming threat from Carthage, which was attempting to enlarge its presence in Sicily.

The
Assyrian encroachment on
Phoenicia in the seventh century
BCE
had
left the Carthaginians free to pursue their own destiny. After defeating a fleet from the Greek colony of
Massilia (
Marseille) at the
battle of Alalia, off
Corsica, in 535
BCE
, the Carthaginians and their Etruscan allies effectively closed the western Mediterranean to Greek shipping. The
Etruscans had been the dominant force in central
Italy since the end of the ninth century
BCE
and reached their apogee around the time of Alalia. Their territories extended across the peninsula from the
Tyrrhenian Sea (so-called from the Greek name for the Etruscans) to the Adriatic (named for the Etruscan town of Adria).
Numerous models, carved images, and graffiti of boats and ships attest to their involvement in seafaring, as do the proximity of their towns to the sea, manifestations of Phoenician, Greek, and Carthaginian influences on Etruscan culture, and the evidence of an Etruscan presence in
Sardinia, Corsica, and other western islands. Etruscan shipwrights are the
first known to have rigged ships with two masts, the earliest representation of which, dated to the 450s
BCE
, is on a painted wall in the
Tomb of the Ship at Tarquinia, near the Tyrrhenian coast north of
Civitavecchia.
They also employed rams, and the oldest written (as distinct from pictorial) reference to a ram is in
Herodotus’s account of the battle of Alalia.

Made around 675
BCE
by a potter who signed this work, the Aristonothos krater was found in the ancient Etruscan city of Caere (Cerveteri, Italy). This scene seems to show a Greek ship with a ram and raised deck for fighters (left) overtaking an Etruscan sailing ship. It is the oldest depiction of a ship fitted with a ram from the western Mediterranean. While this scene has no immediate literary counterparts, on the opposite side of the krater the artist has shown Odysseus blinding the cyclops Polyphemus—son of Poseidon, god of the sea—from Book Nine of the Odyssey. Photograph by Faraglia, D-DAI-ROM 8208. Courtesy of the Deutsche Archäologische Institut, Rome.

The fifth century
BCE
was a period of substantial change in Italy and Sicily. Most notable was the waning power of the Etruscans, whom the Romans bested for the first time in 510
BCE
, and whom a Cumaean-Syracusan fleet defeated at the naval
battle of Cumae in 474, when they were still regarded as “
masters of the sea.” Even before this, the Syracusans entered a period of rapid expansion under
Gelon. When other Sicilian cities appealed for help, the Carthaginians sent two hundred ships and two hundred thousand crew, infantry, and cavalry from North Africa,
Iberia, Italy, Sardinia, and Corsica “
under the command of Hamilcar … king of Carthage.”
^a
In 480
BCE
, the year that
Xerxes invaded Greece, Hamilcar sailed for Sicily only to be defeated by Gelon at the Himera River. Nonetheless, the Carthaginians continued to expand their presence in Sicily, although the Syracusans remained indomitable foes, especially under
Dionysius I, who was tyrant from 405 to 367
BCE
. Among the most ambitious, multifaceted, and long-lived rulers in ancient Sicily, he checked the Carthaginian advance in Sicily and extended his rule over much of southern Italy.

Dionysus is credited with being one of the first people to experiment with polyremes, galleys with more than one rower to an oar. Less is known about the manning of polyremes, which were designated by the number of oarsmen in a single vertical file of rowers, than about
triremes. But galleys probably never had more than three banks of oars, and polyremes could have only one or two. Later European practice indicates that the maximum number of
rowers per oar was eight, so the largest polyreme would have been designated a “twenty-four.” A four (
quadrireme in Latin, or
tetrereis
in Greek) could have one
thalamian, one
zeugite, and two thranite rowers, while a five (quinquereme, or
pentereis
) might have three rowers per oar on one level and two per oar on another. The flagship of the Carthaginian commander at the
battle of Mylae in the
First
Punic War “
was a single-banked vessel with seven men to each oar” and designated a “seven.”
Aristotle attributed the invention of the quadrireme to the Carthaginians, and Dionysus is credited with the invention of the quinquereme, but whether they originated with Syracusan or Carthaginian shipwrights, polyremes were a central Mediterranean innovation.

Why polyremes were developed in the first place is unclear, but the stability provided by a wider ship would have been one advantage. Larger ships could mount
catapults, the oldest form of long-range shipboard artillery. Alexander used shipborne catapults during the siege of Tyre, but the seagoing catapult did not come into its own until the development of “super-galleys” by the
Antigonid king,
Demetrius the Besieger. Catapults were specialized affairs; a fourth-century
BCE
inventory of the naval warehouse at
Piraeus lists both arrow-shooting and grapnel-hurling catapults. More creative tacticians recommended hurling pots of vipers, scorpions, and other natural-born killers, while improvements in fire weapons were sought constantly. Ramming continued to be an important aspect of naval warfare in the Hellenistic and
Roman periods, but taking enemy ships by boarding remained a preferred tactic, and
Roman
quinqueremes of the mid-third century
BCE
carried 300 rowers and 120 marines.

The development of polyremes led to the building of ever more extravagant ships and made control of the
timber supplies in
Macedonia,
Cilicia, Cyprus, and Lebanon a primary objective of Alexander’s Hellenistic successors. Because access to tall trees was essential for the shipbuilding industries that sustained maritime trade, and for the naval forces required to protect that trade from rivals and to secure access to the wood, the naval struggle in the Hellenistic period fed on itself. The appetite for wood was further whetted by the development of ever-larger ships, including leviathans believed to have been massive twin-hulled vessels. In the mid-third century
BCE
, the
Egyptian fleet of
Ptolemy II Philadelphus boasted two “thirtys” and that of his grandson
Ptolemy IV Philopator included a “forty.” The dimensions of the latter, given by the historian Athenaeus, are fantastic, but credible: 15 meters wide, 122 meters long, with room for 4,000 oarsmen, 2,850 marines, and 400 officers and other crew. Theoretically no galley could be larger than a “twenty-four”—a vessel with three banks of oars, with eight men pulling on each oar. It is thought that
Ptolemy IV’s “forty” comprised two “twentys”—that is, with
twenty oarsmen in a single file distributed in some combination among the upper, middle, and lower banks—with a raised platform deck that spanned the two hulls to accommodate the marines and others. The only catamaran galley known by name is
Demetrius the Besieger’s
Leontophoros
, with 1,600 rowers distributed between two “eights.” While larger ships had definite tactical advantages—those of Demetrius “
had a speed and effectiveness which was more remarkable than their great size”—the most extreme of these vessels were intended to magnify the power of the rulers who built them rather than for any practical purpose.
Plutarch notes that Ptolemy IV’s “forty” was “only for show. Hardly differing from buildings that are fixed in the ground, it moved unsteadily and with difficulty, to make appearance for display, not use.”

Such showboating reflects the increased importance of navies and naval power in the Hellenistic period, but it was not confined to warships. Athenaeus also describes the
Syracusia,
a huge three-masted grain ship built for
Hiero II of
Syracuse by the engineer and mathematician
Archimedes. Pine and
fir were obtained from the forests of nearby Mount Etna and southern Italy, cordage from Spain, and hemp and pitch for caulking from the Rhône valley in France. The hull was fastened with copper spikes weighing up to seven kilograms, and the planks were sheathed in a tarred fabric covered by
lead sheets, an inexpensive form of surface caulking. Anticipating the grandest twentieth-century transatlantic liners in opulence, the middle deck featured cabins for 142 first-class passengers—“
All had floors done in multi-colored mosaic; in these was worked, in amazing fashion, the whole story of the
Iliad
”—in addition to accommodations for “bilge-watchers,” or steerage passengers. The lower deck was reserved for cargo. First-class passengers could use a library, a gymnasium, promenades lined with flower beds, a chapel dedicated to
Aphrodite, and a bath. Twenty horses could be carried in separate stalls, and there was ample provision for freshwater and a saltwater fish tank for the cook’s use. The ship was defended by four hundred marines who could fight the ship from the bronze tops of the three masts or from a raised fighting deck, the latter fitted with a
catapult of Archimedes’ design. The number of crew is not specified, but Athenaeus says that “although the bilge was extraordinarily deep, it was bailed by only one man using a screw pump, one of Archimedes’ inventions.” No linear dimensions survive, but the cargo on the ship’s maiden voyage to Alexandria included 60,000 measures of grain, 10,000 jars of pickled fish, 20,000 talents of wool, and 20,000 talents of miscellaneous cargo, about 1,900 tons burden, not including provisions for the ship’s complement. The ship proved too large for most ports, and Hiero decided to rename his ship for Egypt’s main port and to give the
Alexandria
to his ally
Ptolemy III.

Their alliance with
Syracuse, the dominant power to their west, ensured that the Ptolemies could focus their attention on their primary rivals, the
Antigonids and the
Seleucids. The first major sea battle of the Hellenistic age was fought off Salamis,
Cyprus, in 306
BCE
.
Demetrius the Besieger set more than a hundred ships against an even larger fleet belonging to
Ptolemy I in an effort to help his father,
Antigonus, establish himself as sole successor to Alexander. Though outnumbered, Demetrius is said to have captured forty warships and one hundred transports before besieging Rhodes. The port held out for a year in part because of the Rhodians’ ability to run the blockade with grain from Alexandria. By a subsequent treaty, Rhodes aligned itself with Antigonus with the proviso that she never be obliged to wage war against the Ptolemies. To celebrate the lifting of Demetrius’s siege, the Rhodians erected an enormous statue to the sun god, Helios. Acclaimed as one of the wonders of the ancient world, the Colossus of Rhodes stood in the port until an earthquake struck the city in 227/226
BCE
. The Rhodians’ reputation as honest brokers enabled them to make “
such sound practical use of the incident that the disaster was a cause for improvement to them rather than of damage.” Gifts poured in from around the Mediterranean: silver,
catapults, and
exemption from duties from Syracuse; silver, timber for twenty ships, bronze to repair the Colossus, the loan of 450 masons and builders, and a shipment of more than thirty thousand tons of grain from Egypt; and comparable gifts from other Hellenistic states.

Rhodes’s success owed much to its favorable geographical position, in the southeast Aegean about ten miles off the southwest corner of Asia Minor. At the northern end of the island, the town of Rhodes boasted a complex of five harbors lined with dockyards, ship sheds, and facilities for merchants. The Rhodians fostered alliances with a variety of competing powers—its balancing act between the Antigonids and the Ptolemies being the earliest example—and wielded diplomacy and naval power to achieve hegemony over lesser powers in and around the Aegean. They are also credited with developing the rules that later formed the basis of commercial
maritime law in Rome and the so-called
Rhodian Sea Law of the Byzantine Empire, although the actual content of their own laws can only be inferred from later writings. The Rhodians also offered protection against pirates and others who tried to inhibit trade, and they were viewed as “
the constant protectors not only of their own liberty, but of that of the rest of Greece.” Unlike the Athenians, who had discouraged allies from making nonmonetary contributions to the
Delian League to limit the growth of rivals, the Rhodians supplied the ships, which they distributed
among relatively small squadrons based at different islands and harbors, while the allies contributed crews. The importance they attached to their antipiracy patrols is reflected in their development of a variety of smaller patrol vessels. The most common was probably the
triemiolia
, which is thought to have resembled a
trireme, but with only 120 rowers rather than 170. These were not unlike large coast guard vessels of today, imposing in their own right against pirates and smugglers but not fit to face off against full-fledged warships.