The Isle of Stone

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The island’s appearance varied with the hours. Late in the afternoon it was a featureless undulation, low-slung and stealthy like a surfacing submarine contoured to evade detection. With the morning light at his back, the observer faced a two-color composition of hardscrabble and scrub green that, even from far across the bay, looked pitted from numberless insults. A string of low pinnacles formed a jagged line off the south end, culminating in a flat-topped butte-Little Sphacteria-that seemed to follow its consort like a lifeboat. Both islands are great concretions of marine detritus, alternately squeezed and lifted, their bodies rent by fissures, dimpled by sinkholes, tortured by the sea.

The land bears scars of its own violent legacy. The western reaches of Messenia were once protected by three thousand foot limestone ramparts, including Sphacteria, more ancient than the gods. The wall was wracked along the fault lines that invested it, until it was finally breached. The soft, near-shore soils were then exposed to the assault of wind and water, resulting in the largest stretch of protected anchorage in Greece.

The surface calm still hides the conflict of titanic forces. The commerce of centuries, including Athenian triremes, Turkish galleys, and modern excursion boats, has plied these waters oblivious to the dramatic, earthquake-riven landscapes beneath. Less than a mile from Sphacteria’s west coast the sea floor plunges to seven hundred feet; a few dozen miles farther out lies an abyss deep enough that if Mount Blanc were dropped inside, its summit would be submerged a depth of one thousand feet.

On this particular day, inside a pointed archway punched through the mass of Little Sphacteria, the rising sun revealed the gleaming ram of a warship. A good pair of eyes might have seen the white tunics of the ship’s senior crew atop the rock, looking north at the prison they’d made for the Lacedaemonians. A few moments later another trireme of the Athenian fleet rounded the island. It was one of two vessels Demosthenes kept in constant orbit around Sphacteria, traveling in opposite directions, day and night, in all weather. The blockade had been underway for a week.

The trireme Terror arrived with Eurymedon’s rescue force from Zacynthus and alternated on blockade duty ever since. Over the eight hours of its watch it had circled the island in a counterclockwise direction, proceeding at a steady pace that brought it around twice. By the end of the last hour the rowers were tired: the blades of their oars no longer cleared the water by much on the backstroke, and the piper was forced to slow the cadence. The men were looking forward to a meal and a rest-though with the Peloponnesians in control of both the island and the mainland coast there was not much land for them to dry their hulls. The only safe spot was Demosthenes’ little stockade on the beach near the Sikia Channel. This had grown over the week into a busy little port, with more than fifty Athenian vessels lining up offshore, waiting their turns for their crews to pull out, eat, and snatch whatever sleep they could in the sand. The prolonged monotony took its toll: there were affirming murmurs all around when Patronices, the eldest of the oarsmen at fifty years old, spat from the starboard outrigger and grumbled, “I say we’ve got ourselves under siege, not the Lacedaemonians!”

The mood was much the same as it had been in Athens two months earlier. The year’s campaign was the seventh consecutive summer of war against the Peloponnesians. The Lacedaemonian land army had not yet arrived in Attica that summer, but inevitably would come. The enemy would then settle in for a season of economic devastation-burning houses, upending crops, razing trees. The Athenians, meanwhile, would watch ruefully from the tops of their city walls as the works of their fathers went up in flames. That all this was stipulated in Pericles’ grand strategy-that the entire population of Attica would withdraw safely behind the city walls, supplied by the navy while the invincible Spartans raged outside-did little to relieve the general dejection. Pericles had, after all, not anticipated the outbreak of plague in the second year of the war that would kill so many thousands, including himself. Now all that was left of noble Pericles was his tomb, a few pretty buildings, and his strategy.

The crowding inside the walls, and the threat of a new outbreak of plague, made it easy to recruit crews for the triremes. What else was there to do, except to take any opportunity to work their revenge against the enemy? And so it was with the usual combination of anticipation and unease that nearly seven thousand dispossessed citizens, resident aliens, and slaves took the oars of the fleet under Eurymedon.

The sun cleared the mass of Mount Hymettos to reveal forty ships gathered off Piraeus. As the crews and captains sat with their heads bowed, and thousands more of their relatives gathered on the shore, a herald led them in prayers to Athena-the-Guardian, Enyalios, and the other gods of the city. At a signal, libations of wine in silver cups were poured in unison from the bows of every ship, and from golden bowls by the priests on land. At last the assembled citizens, ashore and afloat, sang in praise of Poseidon as Eurymedon ordered the vanguard to pull out to the cadence of the hymn. Tears standing on their cheeks, those left behind sang out as the voices of their fathers and brothers faded on the water, the line of their sails sinking into the mists around Aegina.

The crew of the Terror had special incentive to reach the theater of war. Their town, Acharnae, was set in the plains northwest of the Cephisus river, six miles north of Athens. Nearly every summer for seven years their land had been sacked by the enemy. Having been evacuated within the walls of Athens, the Acharnians were in excellent position to witness the plumes of smoke rise from their homes, fields, and vineyards.

The Lacedaemonians added insult to injury by making the place their preferred spot to camp for the season. Thanks to the proximity of the forests of Mount Parnes, Acharnae was a center for the production of charcoal; the particular sweet odor of burning coal was as familiar to Acharnian children as the scent of their mothers’ hair. It was therefore with particular bitterness that the exiles smelled the fruit of their labor on the wind from the Spartan campfires. But despite the wailing of the women and the young warriors’ demands to punish the invaders right away, the Athenian generals would allow no piecemeal attack. The frustration of the Acharnians made them the most hawkish of all, opposed to any accommodation with the enemy. The playwright Aristophanes exploited their almost pathological jingoism to the hilt in his comedies. The Acharnians, in return, thought little of wits like Aristophanes.

Fortunately for the town’s partisans, the richest man in Acharnae, Philemon, son of Hippias, saw fit to spend ten thousand drachmas to outfit a warship. The Terror’s hull was of a typical trireme design, forty yards in length and five across at her widest. One hundred seventy rowers were packed inside in stacked triplets rising from near the keel to the outriggers built atop her bulwarks. The Terror was fast because she was unstable: like her fleetmates, she was fast in calm water but so slender abeam as to be a menace to her crew in rough seas. For this reason she hardly ever sailed out of sight of land, and spent her nights beached.

The Terror was exceptional for certain other reasons. Philemon, as the vessel’s sponsor, was nominally its captain but in practice functioned more like poorly stowed ballast. His girth made it difficult for him to move unassisted even on land; at sea, where the proper distribution of weight was particularly important, Philemon seldom dared leave the little cabin he had built for himself on the top deck. If it had not been for his fear of the plague in Athens he would never had gone to sea at all. As it was he kept to his couch, diverting himself with plates of relish he could never keep down when the ship moved. When he was glimpsed, it was to empty his bucket. When the crew heard his voice, it was to make noises of authority from behind a curtain that the crew, over time, had learned to ignore.

As poor a sailor as Philemon was, he was an excellent delegator. His hired captain, Xeuthes, son of Cratinus, was a veteran of a hundred actions from Cyprus to Sicily. Born within spitting distance of the strand at Munychia, his first memory was the spectacle of the Athenian navy smashing the Persians at Salamis. His father, Cratinus, piloted a trireme during the battle, and kept Xeuthes at his side through many of the campaigns that followed in Ionia and among the islands. As he came of age he became the living image of his father, down to the flat nose, sunblasted skin, and salt irremediably ingrained in his beard.

With so many ships fitting out in Athens during those years, it was difficult to find a decent helmsman. Xeuthes scored a coup, then, when he brought aboard an old comrade, Sphaerus of Anaphlystus. This character was of such indeterminate antiquity that he called Xeuthes “sonny”; he seemed to have firsthand experience of Artemisium, a battle fought fifty-five years earlier. There was some concern all around when Sphaerus had to be physically led to the helmsman’s position on deck, between the two rudders mounted on either side of the hull. They had to guide his hands to the raked tillers as if he could see nothing at all.

The oarsmen below decks were the hardest of the hard core of Acharnian patriots. Some, such as Dicaearchus, son of Erasinus, were rich men before the Lacedaemonians sacked their estates. Others, like Cleinias, son of Menanthus, and Timon, son of nobody-knows, were dirt poor laborers from the charcoal works to whom the rowers’ salary of one drachma a day was a considerable windfall. All were landlubbers from a place as distant from the sea as any in Attica. Yet together they constituted one of the best crews in the fleet, working together so well that they once almost beat the state flagship, Salaminia, from Piraeus to Aegina. This feat was all the more remarkable because the Terror’s gang of riffraff matched the Salaminia’s crew of professionals stroke for stroke.

On their first trip around the Peloponnese they sailed in the company of nineteen other ships under the admiral Phormio. This voyage was as gratifying as any campaign the Acharnians had ever seen on land or sea-with the Peloponnesian ships afraid to engage them, the entire enemy coast was open to attack. The Athenians paused where they pleased to burn towns just as the Lacedaemonians did in Attica; when they landed their ships for the night they were free to liberate all the provisions they needed from nearby farms, including cattle and pigs. To the relief of the oarsmen-and the delight of Philemon-the men of the Terror ate better and got better air and water on campaign than they ever had in overcrowded, plague-ridden, bug-infested Athens.

The only cloud on their horizon was Xeuthes’ mania for equalizing the oar power of the ship. It was not unusual for the port or starboard side to be stronger because, by chance, one or the other team of rowers had more strength or superior technique. Yet producing balanced teams was not as easy as simply commanding the oarsmen to swap benches. There was a clear heirarchy in the positions of the rowers, with those seated atop the outriggers, the so-called “beam men,” getting the most fresh air and the best view of the action outside. Below them were those in seats mounted on the middeck (the “deck men”), and lowest of all those laboring belowdecks, or the “hold men.” The deck men could see little of the outside world and depended on the beam men for guidance, but their position was still infinitely preferable to being in the lowest rank. With their benches mounted barely above water level, the hold men worked in a sunken stall of wood and flesh. If the ship was flooded they were least likely of all to escape with their lives. On a long voyage the atmosphere could be stifling, as they pitched blindly in their warrens, the stench of bilgewater rising from below while an unrelenting flow of sweat, urine, or worse flowed down from the crewmen above. To ask the beam man Patronices to exchange seats with a hold man like Timon was, therefore, as good as to invite Patronices to riot. In the end, Xeuthes had to match the power on each beam by exchanging men of equal rank only-a puzzle that took days to sort out.

The wisdom of the captain’s preparations paid off during their very first battle. In the third summer of the war, Phormio based his little fleet at Naupactus, on the Crisaean Gulf athwart the shipping lanes of Sparta’s ally, Corinth. The Peloponnesians had sent a fleet of forty-seven ships under their admiral Machaon to support an attack on Athens’ allies in Acarnania. Though he had fewer than half Machaon’s force, Phormio shadowed the Corinthians. Supposing that they would try to slip by him in the predawn darkness, he then positioned his fleet to catch them on open water.

The enemy, having more troop carriers than triremes, adopted a defensive circle with their rams facing out. If Machaon’s men had been Athenians, there would have been little chance of breaking into their formation. But the Corinthian crews were not nearly so disciplined. Phormio’s ships encouraged their disorder by rowing around them in a circle, sometimes passing close enough to brush against their rams. As the sun rose and the wind freshened, the enemy ring became a lozenge, then a confused tangle of prows and oars. Judging that moment to be most opportune, Phormio released his fleet to attack.

Sphaerus had by this time done as little steering as necessary. At the captain’s signal, the old man worked the rudders to make a sharp portside turn, then shot into a gap between two Corinthians with their oar-blades ensnared. In that single maneuver, the Terror sheared off the oars of both ships, then went on to ram Machaon’s ship beyond them. Witnesses in the other Athenian ships cheered; the men of the Terror endured a few breathless moments as Xeuthes ordered them to extend their oars back into the water and row for their lives in reverse. But Sphaerus had not doomed them by planting their ram in an irretrievable spot. Their ram pulled away easily, opening a hole in the enemy flagship that sank it to its top rails in minutes.

By the battle’s end the Athenians scattered a superior fleet and captured twelve vessels. The Terror, having disabled three vessels all on her own, distinguished herself most of all. In the seasons that followed she was not always on the winning side; on a number of occasions she survived only by running away. But there was no doubting her value on difficult voyages far from home-including, in the war’s seventh summer, blockade duty around a desert island, with a precarious base of supply and no end in sight.