A History of Sea Power. Allan F. Westcott
towards Corinth. This battle of Naupaktis remains one of the most brilliant naval victories in history, a victory won against overwhelming odds by quick decision and superb audacity.
Only a half century separates Salamis from the battle of the Corinthian Gulf and the battle of Naupaktis, but during that period there had been a great advance in naval science.
As far as naval tactics are concerned, Salamis was merely a fight between two mobs of ships, except that when opportunity offered, a vessel used her ram. Otherwise the only difference from land fighting was the fact that the combatants stood on floating platforms. But in the Peloponnesian war we see not only the birth of naval tactics but a very high development, especially as revealed in these two victories of Phormio.
With the development of a naval science rose also a naval profession. At Salamis Themistocles was a politician and Eurybiades was a soldier; it happened that they were made fleet commanders for the emergency. Phormio was a naval officer by profession, and he won by genius combined with superior efficiency in the personnel under his command. In his courage, resourcefulness, in the spirit he inspired, and the high pitch of skill he developed among his officers and men, he is an ideal type for every later age. Little is known of his life and character beyond the story of these two exploits, but they are sufficient to give him the name of the first great admiral of history.
His exploits illustrate, too, at the very outset of naval history, the vital truth that the man counts more than the machine. In these later days, when the tendency is to measure naval power merely by counting dreadnoughts, and to settle all hypothetical combats by the proportion of strength at a given point on the game board, it is well to remember that the most overwhelming victories have been won by the skill and audacity of a great leader, which overcame odds that would be reckoned by the experts as insuperable.
The Peloponnesian war dragged on with varying fortunes for ten years. The Athenians were regularly successful on the sea and unsuccessful on land. They seem to have laid an unwise dependence on their navy for a state situated on the mainland with land communications open to the enemy. They attempted to make an island of their state by withdrawing into the city of Athens the entire population of Attica, leaving open to the invader the rest of the province. The repeated ravaging of Attica by Peloponnesian armies weakened both the resources and the morale of the Athenians, and the crowding of the inhabitants into the city resulted in frightful mortality from the plague. At the same time the naval expeditions sent out to harry the coast of the Peloponnesus accomplished nothing of real advantage.
In 421 a truce was agreed upon between Athens and Sparta, which was to last fifty years. Both sides were sorely weakened by the protracted struggle and neither had gained any real advantage over the other. Without waiting to recuperate from the losses of the war, Athens embarked in 415 on an ambitious plan of conquering Syracuse, and gaining all of Sicily as an Athenian colony. In the event of success Athens would have a western outpost for the eventual control of the Mediterranean, as she already had an eastern outpost in Ionia, which gave her control of the Ægean.
In the light of the event it is customary to refer to this expedition as the climax of folly, and yet it is clear that if the commander in chief had not wasted time in interminable delays the Athenians might easily have won their objective. At first the Syracusans felt hopeless because of the large army and fleet dispatched against them, and the great naval prestige of their enemy, but as delay succeeded delay, assistance arrived from Corinth and Sparta, and the besieged citizens took heart. The siege dragged on for the greater part of two years, with the offensive gradually slipping from the Athenians to the Syracusans, till finally the invaders found their troops besieged on shore and their ships bottled up in the harbor by a line of galleys anchored across the entrance. The Syracusans knew that they were no match for the Athenians on the open sea, but with a fleet crowded into a harbor with no room for maneuvering, the problem was not essentially different from that of fighting on land. They built a fleet of ships with specially strengthened bows for ramming and erected catapults for throwing heavy stones on the decks of the enemy. Meanwhile, the Athenian ships had deteriorated from lack of opportunity to refit and their crews had been heavily reduced by disease. In a pitched battle between the two fleets in the harbor, the Athenians were worsted. Shortly after as the Athenians were attempting to break through the barrier and escape, they were again attacked by the Syracusans. There was no room for maneuvering; the Athenian ships were jammed together in a mass in which all advantage of numbers was lost. Moreover, against the deadly rain of huge stones the Athenians had no defense whatever.
The result was an overwhelming victory for the Syracusans. Out of 110 triremes the Athenians lost fifty. The besieging army went to pieces in attempting a retreat across the island, and the whole expedition came to a tragic end. This defeat of the Athenian fleet in the harbor of Syracuse was the ruin of Athens. When the news reached Greece, many of her dependencies revolted, the Peloponnesian war had broken out anew, and she had no strength left to hold her own. The deathblow was given when a Spartan admiral destroyed all that was left of the Athenian navy at Ægospotami in the year 405. Thereafter Athens was merely a conquered province, permitted to keep a fleet of only twelve ships, and watched by a garrison of Spartan soldiers in the citadel.
The downfall of Athenian sea power at Syracuse may be compared with the downfall of Persian sea power at Salamis. Just as the latter prevented the spread of an Asiatic form of civilization in Europe and gave Greek civilization a chance to develop, so the former put an end to the extension of a strong Hellenic power in Italy and left opportunity for the rise of the civilization of Rome.
REFERENCES
History of Greece, Ernst Curtius, 1874.
History of Greece, George Grote, 1856.
The Great Persian War, G. B. Grundy, 1901.
History of the Persian Wars, Herodotus, ed. and transl. by Geo. Rawlinson, 1862.
History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, ed. and transl. by Jowett.
CHAPTER III
THE SEA POWER OF ROME
1. THE PUNIC WARS
When peoples have migrated in the past, they have frequently changed their habits to conform to new topographical surroundings. We have seen that the Phœnicians, originally a nomadic people, became a seafaring race because of the conditions of the country they settled in; and on the other hand, at a later period, the Vikings who overran Normandy or Britain forsook the sea and became farmers. The popular idea that a race follows the sea because of an "instinct in the blood of the race" has little to stand on. When, however, the colonists from Phœnicia settled Carthage and founded an empire, they continued the traditions of their ancestors and built up their power on a foundation of ships. This was due to the conditions—topographical and geographical—which surrounded them, and which were much like those of the mother country. Carthage possessed the finest harbor on the coast of Africa, situated in the middle of the Mediterranean, where all the trade routes crossed. To counteract these attractions of the sea there was nothing but the arid and mountainous character of the interior. It was inevitable, therefore, that the Carthaginians, like their ancestors, should build an empire of the sea.
As early as the sixth century B.C. Carthage had established her power so securely in the western Mediterranean as to be able to set down definite limits beyond which Rome agreed not to go. Thus the opening sentence of a treaty between the two nations in 509 BC ran as follows:
"Between the Romans and their allies and the Carthaginians and their allies there shall be peace and alliance upon the conditions that neither the Romans nor their allies shall sail beyond the Fair Promontory[1] unless compelled by bad weather or an enemy; and in case they are forced beyond it they shall not be allowed to take or purchase anything except what is barely necessary for refitting their vessels or for sacrifice, and they shall depart within five days."[2]
[Footnote 1: A cape on the African coast about due north from Carthage.]
[Footnote