Battle of Arginusae: Victory at Sea and Its Tragic Aftermath in the Final Years of the Peloponnesian War

By Debra Hamel

An Athenian triumph against Sparta end in disaster and infamy in this naval history of Ancient Greece in the 5th century B.C.

Toward the end of the Peloponnesian War, nearly three hundred Athenian and Spartan ships fought a pivotal skirmish in the Arginusae Islands. Larger than any previous naval battle between warring Greeks, the Battle of Arginusae was a crucial win for Athens. Its aftermath, however, was a major disaster for its people.

Due to numerous factors, the Athenian commanders abandoned the crews of twenty-five disabled ships. Thousands of soldiers were left clinging to wreckage and awaiting help that never came. When the failure was discovered back home, the eight generals in charge were deposed. Two fled into exile, while the other six were tried and executed.

In The Battle of Arginusae, historian Debra Hamel describes the violent battle and its horrible aftermath. Hamel introduces readers to Athens and Sparta, the two thriving superpowers of the fifth century B.C. She provides a summary of the events that caused the long war and discusses the tactical intricacies of Greek naval warfare. Recreating the claustrophobic, unhygienic conditions in which the ships’ crews operated, Hamel unfolds the process that turned this naval victory into one of the most infamous chapters in the city-state’s history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781421416823

Book preview

THE BATTLE OF ARGINUSAE

WITNESS TO ANCIENT HISTORY

GREG ALDRETE, Series Editor

ALSO IN THE SERIES:

Jerry Toner, The Day Commodus Killed a Rhino: Understanding the Roman Games

THE BATTLE OF ARGINUSAE

Victory at Sea and Its Tragic Aftermath in the Final Years of the Peloponnesian War

Debra Hamel

Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltimore

© 2015 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2015

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Johns Hopkins University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hamel, Debra.

    The Battle of Arginusae : victory at sea and its tragic aftermath in the final years of the Peloponnesian War / Debra Hamel.

           pages cm. — (Witness to ancient history)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-1-4214-1680-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4214-1681-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4214-1682-3 (electronic) — ISBN 1-4214-1680-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-4214-1681-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-4214-1682-4 (electronic)   1.  Arginusae, Battle of, Greece, 406 B.C.   I.  Title.

    DF229.83.H36 2015

    938'.05—dc23

2014030728

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cartography by Bill Nelson.

Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [e-mail].

Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible.

For Clare, ἔφορος τῶν φερεοίκων

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Timeline

Maps

Prologue

I

Setting the Stage: From Xerxes’ Invasion to the Eve of Arginusae

II

Naval Warfare: Ramming, Dying, and Breaking Wind at Sea

III

The Battle of Arginusae: From Manning the Fleet to Collecting Corpses

IV

The Athenians and Their Generals: Democracy and Accountability

V

The Aftermath in Athens: Tribunals and Tribulations

Epilogue

APPENDIX A.

Sequence of Events from the Storm to the Deposition of the Generals

APPENDIX B.

Sequence of Events after the Generals’ Return to Athens

Notes

Suggested Further Reading

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to the usual suspects, Kyle Behen and Victor Bers, for their support, encouragement, and intellectual input lo these many years. Thanks also to Andrew Ruddle of the Trireme Trust and to Bill Nelson for his cartography. Matthew McAdam of Johns Hopkins University Press and series editor Greg Aldrete provided much useful feedback and made this a far more readable text than it would have been otherwise. Barbara Lamb, finally, saved me from countless errors with her meticulous copyediting. This book is dedicated to Clare Dudman, author and snail aficionado, with my thanks for her generous help, enthusiasm, and most of all, friendship.

TIMELINE

In some cases dates appear below with a slash, for example, 446/5. This is because the Athenian year ran from midsummer to midsummer. All dates listed are B.C. See also the appendixes for discussion of the timing of events in 406.

MAPS

Map 1.  Greece

Map 2.  Asia Minor and the Aegean

Map 3.  Attica and the Saronic Gulf

Map 4.  The Battle of Arginusae

THE BATTLE OF ARGINUSAE

Prologue

IF YOU WERE TO FALL off a cruise ship into seventy-two degree water, you’d have a reasonable chance of surviving until help arrived, assuming you could stay afloat; water that temperature is unlikely to kill you for at least several hours. All bets are off, of course, if you also happen to be seriously injured—bleeding out after being stabbed in the gut with a sword, for example—which would severely diminish your expected survival time. On the particular summer day with which we’ll be concerned in this book, in late July or early August of 406 B.C., there were many thousands of men in just this predicament, bobbing in the cool but not immediately deadly waters of the North Aegean, awaiting rescue—albeit not after a recreational cruise. Most of them were Spartans, or allies of Sparta, but our story has to do with the smaller contingent of Athenian bodies that were in the water. At the moment these men were sailors—oarsmen, most of them, with new blisters on their hands and buttocks that were now stinging in the salt water—but back in Athens just a few weeks earlier they’d been storekeepers or carpenters or farmers or slaves. Many of them had never served with Athens’ fleet before, but they’d been called up for service in an emergency. Having done their duty for family and fatherland, they clung now to the wreckage of their wooden ships, their fingers becoming increasingly clumsy the colder they got, and they waited for the rescue boats to pick them up.¹

The Athenians in the water had just taken part in an important naval battle, and their side had won the day, though they may not have known it. In a fight involving hundreds of ships stretched across miles of sea, it’s impossible for any one person at water level to know much about the big picture. But even if they knew nothing for sure, they had reason to be hopeful. They weren’t being picked off by enemy archers, and the Spartans weren’t sailing among them and clubbing them with oar blades or spearing them like fish as they bobbed helplessly in the water. The injured might not make it, those who had been hit by enemy archers or who’d caught a Spartan’s sword or spear when the ships were close enough for the enemy to board. Or maybe they had been hurt on impact, slammed against the ribs of their vessel when a Spartan warship rammed it, opening a hole in the hull. But the rest of them had a fighting chance, if only they could hold out long enough for help to arrive.

We’ll find out what happened to these thousand or more shipwrecked Athenians later in this book. For now we’ll leave them clinging to the fractured hulls of their vessels while we consider how they came to be there. The short answer to that question is that their vessels had been damaged in a battle at sea off the coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) east of Lesbos and west of the Arginusae Islands, from which the battle took its name. The Battle of Arginusae was fought between the Athenians and the Spartans late in the Peloponnesian War, which was now in its twenty-sixth year. A generation had grown up in Athens since a Spartan army kicked off the war by invading Athenian territory in the spring of 431. The Spartans had been unable to inflict much real damage as long as they confined themselves to attacks on Athens’ homeland, but the long war brought changes. The famously conservative Spartans, who had long fielded the most fearsome infantry in ancient Greece, had ultimately adapted their strategy to the needs of the moment and gone to sea, putting into motion a strategy aimed at undermining Athens’ naval empire. The summer of 406 found them in the North Aegean attacking an ally of Athens on the island of Lesbos. More than a month later that attack resulted in a showdown with the Athenians themselves, whose 150 warships had taken up position off the tiny Arginusae islands.

The Battle of Arginusae was the largest naval battle that had ever been fought between Greeks, with nearly three hundred ships involved in the fight.² It also turned out to be the Athenians’ last victory of the war. The win was not a foregone conclusion, as the Spartan fleet they fought was more experienced. This in itself is noteworthy, since Athens historically had by far the better navy. But the Athenians had had to respond to a crisis by hastily putting a fleet together, and they had pretty much scraped the bottom of the barrel in manning it. Everything depended on the ships they had in the water at Arginusae. Losing the battle would almost certainly have meant their total defeat in the war—and defeat, in the ancient world, very often meant the annihilation of one’s population, fathers and brothers and sons executed to a man, the women and children sold into slavery. Athens’ victory, then, hardly to be hoped for, was cause for relief and joy and celebration back in Athens. Paradoxically, Arginusae was also one of the worst disasters that befell the Athenians in the twenty-seven years of their war with Sparta.

This book tells the story of the Battle of Arginusae and its horrible aftermath, what happened on the water and back in Athens that turned the victory into one of the most infamous chapters in the city-state’s history. The book begins by introducing readers to the two great superpowers of the fifth century B.C., Athens and Sparta, which had fought as allies in the early years of the century but came to be pitted against each other in its last decades. The first chapter also provides a summary of fifth-century history from the Second Persian War to the summer of 406, when the Athenians launched the fleet, manned by inexperienced crews, that would fight at Arginusae. Chapter 2, the first of two thematic chapters in the book, discusses Greek naval warfare—the ships and tactics that had put the Persians to rout at the Battle of Salamis in 479 and had since earned Athens her naval empire. We return to the historical narrative in chapter 3, which discusses Arginusae itself, from the Athenians’ preparation of their fleet to the battle and its immediate aftermath. This is where readers will find out what happened to the shipwrecked sailors who were awaiting rescue after Athens’ victory. Chapter 4 concerns the relationship between the Athenians’ democratic government and their generals. The discussion prepares for the subject of chapter 5, what happened back in Athens when news of the fleet’s victory and its consequences became known to the Athenians. The book closes with a brief look at the end of the Peloponnesian War and at the damage the Arginusae affair has done to Athens’ reputation in the millennia since the battle was fought.

-I-

Setting the Stage: From Xerxes’ Invasion to the Eve of Arginusae

Athens was supreme and almost as untouchable by sea as the Spartans were on land. The irresistible force could not meet the immovable object.

George Cawkwell, Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War

SOON AFTER XERXES, the king of Persia, crossed into Europe in 480 B.C. on his way to conquer Greece, his men saw something that should have given him pause: a horse gave birth to a hare—or so Herodotus tells us in his History of the Persian Wars. The meaning of the portent was clear enough as far as Herodotus was concerned: the Persians would enter Greece in splendor, but they’d be running like rabbits on the way out.¹ And so it went. The Persians marched west across southern Europe and south through Greece. They managed, despite suffering great losses, to muscle their way through a pass at Thermopylae in central Greece, leaving King Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans dead in their wake. At the same time the Persian fleet fought a series of inconclusive naval battles against the Greeks. But when Thermopylae fell, the Greeks fell back. They wound up stationed at Salamis, an island not quite a mile off the west coast of Attica. The ensuing battle in the narrow strait between Salamis and the mainland was a devastating loss for the Persians. They had yet to lose the war: they would do that in a pair of land battles the following year. But the loss at Salamis changed everything. It prompted Xerxes to return to Persia with what was left of his fleet, his men running like rabbits, or at least rowing like rabbits, in their haste to get out of Greek waters.

Back before things started going badly for Xerxes, no one would have bet his pension on a Greek victory over Persia. Persia was a vast empire that stretched from Egypt to the Indus River, encompassing more land than the Roman Empire would at its height.² It had been an expansionist power for some seventy years, swallowing up whole nations, rolling west across Asia and into North Africa. Most recently the Persians had cut a swath across the north Aegean to Macedon. Greece, which lay just to the south of Macedon, was simply next in line to be absorbed. By comparison with the Persian behemoth, Greece was tiny, with correspondingly fewer resources: Xerxes almost certainly brought with him to Greece far more men and ships than his enemy could muster.

Greece was not only dwarfed by its adversary, it was also at a disadvantage because it was not a united nation. It was composed of hundreds of small, independent city-states, or poleis, which were very often at war with one another. The Greeks shared a common culture. They worshipped the same gods and spoke mutually intelligible dialects of the same language. They recognized a shared Greekness. But that didn’t stop them from regularly killing one another in battle. When the Greeks faced an existential threat from Persia, however, many of them (not all: some poleis wound up siding with Persia) put aside their private disputes and formed a league to combat their common enemy—what modern scholars call the Hellenic League. Two poleis in particular played a crucial role in the fight against Persia. One was widely recognized as preeminent among the Greeks in infantry battle. The other contributed the largest number of ships to the allied Greek fleet.

Sparta

The first of these two dominant poleis was Sparta, whose capital lay some twenty-five miles inland on the banks of the Eurotas River in the Peloponnese. In the eighth century B.C., when many other city-states began siphoning off their surplus populations by establishing colonies throughout the Mediterranean, Sparta opted to meet its need for more land by subjugating and enslaving its neighbors to the south and west. Later the Spartans further expanded their influence through a series of individual alliances with other states, most but not all of them in the Peloponnese.