THE BATTLE OF AEGOSPOTAMI 405 BC - PART ONE

Apologies for the typo on last week’s rant - it should of course have been FLAG not FALG. Back to history this week.

THE BATTLE OF AEGOSPOTAMI 405 BC – PART ONE

Difficult enough to spell, never mind instantly recalling where it is, Aegospotami was a battle over two thousand and forty years ago which can reasonably be said materially to affect the way the world lives today.  It happened at a Y junction in history, a battle between the two Mediterranean superpowers, Athens and Sparta.  The situation was so finely balanced that it could have been won by either side.  Sparta won, and the nascent democracy of Greece was snuffed out, adult suffrage as a concept died, government officials responsible to the people they governed were no more, and we in the twenty-first century are the product of a Roman world, and not a Greek one.  Our language, our legal system, the Christian religion all owe their origins to Rome, whereas if Athens had won the battle Sparta as a military power would have been eclipsed for ever, the Macedonian conquest, if it had been attempted at all, would have been defeated and Rome would have been just another trading post in a Greek dominated Italy.  Athenian democracy was not, of course, universal suffrage as we know it today.  Athens was a slave state (as indeed was every other state bordering the Mediterranean and beyond) and the vote only extended to male free citizens, but it was a start.  Genuine elections took place, government policy was debated at length and voted upon, rulers and officials held office by leave of the electorate.  Had Athens won the battle, and thus the war, it is reasonable to assume that the Athenian system of government would have been extended and developed over time and the world might well have become a kinder, a more tolerant, place. Greek democracy would have flourished and lived on – but that was not to be. 

Aegospotami, a naval battle in the Dardanelles fought over one day in 405 BC, is one of relatively few battles of the ancient world that we know a great deal about.  It was recorded in detail by Thucydides and Aristophanes who were contemporaries, by Xenophon who was born twenty-five years after the battle but who talked to veterans of it, and by Plutarch, who wrote long after the events (he lived from 46 to 119 AD) but had access to records now lost.  The accounts of these writers have survived, and combined with modern archaeological discoveries, they allow us to peer through the mists of time and obtain a reasonably clear understanding of what happened, and how the results of that battle affect us today in our twenty-first-century world.  Aegospotami was the culminating, and finally decisive, battle of the Peloponnesian War, fought between two regional alliances, one led by Athens, and the other by Sparta, which lasted for twenty-seven years from 431 to 404 BC and which saw the end of the Glory that was Greece.

Although Greece was recognised as an independent state in 1832 she did not begin to establish her modern borders until 1923, as a result of breaking away from the Ottoman Empire and taking advantage of the Balkan Wars, with British support including the gifting of the Ionian islands. The incorporation of the Dodecanese islands in 1947 completed her borders as they are today.  Ancient Greece, before its subjection to the Macedonians and after that to the Romans, consisted of a plethora of around two hundred city states, nominally independent and each with its own laws and customs, but in practice often subservient to a larger, richer and more powerful neighbour.  By around 600 BC most of these cities were allied either to Athens or to Sparta, who despite sharing a common language and religion, were very different in their customs and culture.

Athens had been populated since at least 5000 BC but by 1500 BC its citizens were concentrating on trade rather than agriculture, as apart from producing particularly good olives the land was too poor to provide for an increasing population.  Despite this her gold and silver mines, along with her trade, made Athens the richest city state in classical Greece.  The Trojan war in the eleventh century BC, by removing Troy’s control of traffic through the Dardanelles, stimulated trade into and around the Black Sea and Greeks of various hues traded cloth, wine and olive oil into it, and timber, iron, precious metals, wheat, processed fish (from the Sea of Azov), wax, and pitch from it.  While most city states on or off the east coast of Greece engaged in trade into the Black Sea it was Athens who was the major player, and to protect her trade routes and defend Greek colonies along the shores of the Black Sea and on the west coast of Persia she developed a navy.  By 500 BC Athens was the dominant naval power in the Aegean, and increasingly in the Mediterranean also, with more ships, more sailors and marines and more experience of naval warfare than any other possible rival.  As time went on most other members of the Delian league – as the Athenian led alliance was termed – had voluntarily given up maintaining their own fleets and instead paid into a common treasury to finance that of Athens. The city of Athens was landlocked, and her main access to the sea was the port of Piraeus. Sometime between 1500 BC and 1100 BC Athens, and most other city states, found it necessary to fortify their territory, and as time went on these fortifications became stronger and more sophisticated.  Athens not only surrounded her city with walls, but these walls also enclosed Piraeus and the five miles or so of the route to that port.  This meant that should Athens be threatened from the land she could simply retire behind her walls and be resupplied by her navy through Piraeus, until the besieger gave up and went away.

Not only was Athens the major trading and naval power of Greece, but she had become the cultural centre too.  As well as those already mentioned, the writers Euripides and Sophocles, the physician Hippocrates (he of the oath) and the philosophers Aristotle, Plato and Socrates all lived and worked in Athens. It was the statesman Solon (640 – 560 BC) who is generally credited with laying the foundations of modern democracy, but this was far from the universal suffrage that we know today.  Solon had distinguished himself as an administrator and as a military commander, and in around 590 BC was appointed to the position of Archon, effectively the head of government.  His main task was to quell social unrest caused by Athens slipping into recession.  The land, such as it was, was mainly owned by a small aristocracy, but worked by commoners who paid one sixth of what they produced to the landowner.  The problem was that in many cases the small farmer was faced with a choice of starving or failing to pay.  As more and more families were saddled with increasing debt, many, unable to pay, were forced into slavery.   Solon’s new legal code laid down that Athenian freemen could not be made slaves.  Debt was reduced and land now given to the farmers, who instead of paying the one sixth of their produce compensated the original owners but at a more modest rate.  Trade was regulated to avoid over production and thus falls in value, and exports were regulated, particularly the trade in olives, which did much to stimulate the one crop that Athens’ otherwise poor soil could produce in quantity and quality.

Society too was restructured into four classes dependent upon land value, the lowest class being those who owned no land or who worked on someone else’s. Now for the first time social position did not depend upon birth or family, but on economic worth, and while members of all classes had the vote, governmental, administrative and military appointments could be held only by the two upper classes.  By the beginning of the Peloponnesian War the population of Athens, the city and its hinterland, was around 140,000, including 40,000 male citizens, 40,000 slaves, 10,000 resident aliens and 50,0000 Athenian children and females.  Of these the male free citizens could vote, provided they were over the age of 18, had completed their obligatory military service, and whose parents were both citizens. Voting was held in the open air, beside the Acropolis, and all 40,000 eligible citizens were entitled to be present, although in practice only around 6,000 ever turned up. 

All government appointments, with the exception of military appointments, were selected by lot, from those candidates who were willing to have their names put in the hat (actually an amphora).  The assembly appointed a council of 500, chosen by lot from those willing to stand, whose responsibility was to produce laws and make decisions for the assembly to vote on.  The assembly met every ten days or so and debated and then voted on every suggested law, every aspect of foreign policy, whether to make war or to make peace and if the former where an expedition should be sent, how many ships and men it should have and who should command it. Every one of the six thousand attendees was entitled to express his opinion, and debates could last for several days.  It is not surprising that rhetoric and the skills of oratory, including the ability to make a point briefly and swiftly, came to be prized and emphasised in the various schools of Athenian philosophy.

The exception to the appointment by lot was that of the military commanders, the generals and admirals.  There were normally ten of these, and while the equivalent of the Finance Minister’s, or Home Secretary’s posts could be filled by any reasonably competent and relatively honest Athenian, military commanders were responsible for men’s lives and in the last analysis for the very existence of the state.  These men had to know their business and  so were elected from the available professionals.  The term of office was for one year, renewable without limit, and they could be called before the assembly at any time to explain their actions or lack of them.  They had absolute power to enforce military discipline outside the borders of the state, but not within it. 

Unlike the system before the formation of the Delian League, when navies were not full-time professional bodies but cargo ships converted to warships when required, Athens’ considerable riches allowed her to maintain a regular navy of 200 triremes, increasing to 300 during the war, with a requirement to build twenty per year to make up for ships sunk, captured, destroyed or simply becoming unseaworthy.  A typical trireme was 120 feet long, fourteen feet wide, eight feet above the water line and with a draft of three feet.  It had two masts with square sails, but its principal means of propulsion was by 170 rowers in three banks situated one above the other.   There were sixty-two rowers in the top deck, thirty-one on each side, and fifty-four (twenty-seven on each side) on the middle and lower decks. In addition were the captain and his immediate staff, including a musician who played chants for the rowers to keep time, the helmsmen who operated two steering oars, one on each side, sailors to operate the sails and rigging and between ten and twenty marines supported by a few archers (usually four or five) as a boarding party.  Each ship would therefore have a crew of around 200.    Contrary to legend the rowers of Athenian ships were not slaves but young men doing their obligatory military service and older professionals.  Cruising speed was around 6 knots, while this could be increased to eight knots for short periods. There are recorded instances of triremes covering sixty miles in a day, although this may have been under a combination of oars and sails.  Given the number of men on board and the dimensions of the ship, which while allowing speed and manoeuvrability left little spare space for anything save around two gallons of water per man, the crew could neither feed nor sleep on board and so at night ships would be taken out of the water and beached, being light enough to be carried by the crew, who would buy or forage for food and sleep ashore. 

The trireme had a bronze ram on its bow, and the tactic was to approach an enemy ship at an angle, increasing the rowing to ramming speed, and then withdrawing one’s own oars before coming alongside and breaking the enemy’s oars while also ripping open a length of his side with the ram. This allowed water to pour in and while the ship so struck was unlikely to sink, it lost way and could now be boarded using grappling hooks to hold it against the attacker’s flank.  As Athens could afford to employ professional rowers for at least ten months of the year its fleet was not only larger than any possible rival but its men were fitter and better trained too.