There are many studies on ancient maritime history, the ships, naval battle tactics, and the ecology of the Mediterranean, but this book is the first to look at the subject through the lens of sea power, a term that is familiar to modern naval strategists but less so to scholars of ancient Greece. John Nash, a former officer in the Royal Australian Navy, seeks to demonstrate how our understanding of history can be enriched by modern maritime concepts.[1] The Introduction defines sea power broadly as “a state’s use of the sea in general” (2), including economic, diplomatic, and legal enterprises as well as military or political dominance. With this description of sea power, the book outlines the physical maritime features that shaped what Nash calls a “maritime consciousness” as well as the maritime operations that reflected naval strategies. Nash is, therefore, less interested in tactics and military campaigns than in strategy, which he defines as “the interplay between ends, ways, and means, where the desired end state is reached through particular ‘ways’—the operational level of war—and enabled by the ‘means’—the resources and tactics used in the conduct of operations” (229). In short, this is a book about the influence of maritime forces upon strategic thinking.
The first two chapters cover the practical matters that contributed to a maritime consciousness. Chapter 1 explores the geographic and ecological conditions of the Mediterranean, which, Nash demonstrates, have remained largely consistent throughout history. Through a re-examination of the archaeological and literary evidence, such as the so-called Elephantine Palimpsest, along with data from Nash’s own observations while sailing in the Aegean, the chapter disputes the notion of a mare clausum, the “primitivist” view that ancient seafarers were restricted from sailing during the winter months. Chapter 2 examines evidence related to the ships themselves, including design, personnel, and the infrastructure and financial aspects of running a navy. Here and elsewhere, Nash tries to surmount the Athenocentricism of the extant evidence by making the natural assumption that similar conditions, albeit on a smaller scale, existed in other city-states. These opening chapters are synthetic, relying on the previous scholarship of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, James Beresford, David Blackman and Boris Rankov, and Hans Van Wees, among others.[2]
Nash is more original starting in Chapter 3, which looks at the way that a maritime consciousness was reflected in literature. The chapter opens with examples from mythology and epic. After devoting several pages to the maritime views of Hesiod and anecdotes from the voyage of the Argo and mythological dolphins, Nash admits that “no book dealing with maritime issues can afford to ignore the Odyssey,” before adding, without explanation, that “discussion here will be necessarily brief” (55-56). After barely a paragraph on the Phaiacians, he proceeds to examine closely the negative views toward maritime affairs from historians and philosophers such as Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates. (The “Old Oligarch” appears in Chapter 6.) These writers display an uneasiness or outright opposition to sea power, but Nash reasons that this reaction is an indication of how deeply embedded the sea was in the Greek worldview.
Although Nash attempts to broaden the concept of sea power beyond the military sphere, Chapters 4 through 10 are largely a review of naval warfare in ancient Greek history. (Appendix 2 is a database of 279 maritime operations, the majority of which are military in nature.) Chapter 4 considers how Herodotus and Thucydides portray the earliest Greek navies. Nash argues that there is anachronism in these accounts of early thalassocracies as the classical Greeks looked for precedents for the navies of their day. The chapter also investigates examples from the sixth century, when there is the first evidence for publicly-controlled warships. Chapter 5 reviews the naval battles during the Persian Wars, which demonstrate the capability of the Greeks at that time to coordinate allied fleet movements. Since Nash is interested in the strategic level of warfare, his discussion of these campaigns on the “operational level” is limited to how they reflect the larger strategy. For example, he considers the victories at Artemision, Mycale, and Eurymedon to be due to a strategic approach that emphasized orchestrated operations on land and sea.
The next three chapters focus on the Athenian naval strategy in the fifth century. Chapter 6 surveys how the Athenians developed a strategy that capitalized on their ships, walls, and money to facilitate their rapid rise to power during the Pentecontaetia. Chapters 7 and 8 carry this account of Athenian strategy into the Peloponnesian War. Nash conceives of the war as a conflict between competing strategies rather than between a land power (Sparta) and a naval power (Athens). He, therefore, devotes considerable space to Pericles’ strategy which he compares to the approach in the Persian Wars that combined land and naval components. On the one hand, he defends Thucydides’ view (2.65.7) that it was a winning strategy. He thinks that at the outset of the war the Athenians, in accordance with Pericles’ plans, did more damage to the Peloponnesus than the Spartans did to Attica. On the other hand, he cannot accept Thucydides’ view (2.65.10-12) that Pericles’ successors fundamentally changed that strategy.[3] As Nash sees it, all that changed is that they pursued Pericles’ aims more energetically on an operational level (123). For example, although he concedes that the expedition to Sicily in 427 “does not fit with the war plan outlined by Pericles” (135), he calls the Pylos campaign in 425 “the ultimate success of Periclean strategy” (128), and the exaction of tribute from Cythera in 424 only a “change in operational approach” (127). He even claims that Pericles’ strategy “ultimately succeeded in 421 with the Peace of Nicias” (124), and that Nicias’ proposal for dealing with Sicily in 415, the one that the fleet did not follow, was “a very Periclean course of action” (141). This interpretation of Pericles’ strategy is too expansive. It could include most actions in and approaches to the war, even the Spartan strategy that won the war by combining sea and land components.
The last three chapters cover the extent of sea power among other Greeks besides the Athenians. Chapter 9 continues the examination of Sparta’s control of the seas into the fourth century, and emphasizes how this strategic shift exhibits a maritime consciousness that one does not often attribute to the Spartans. The chapter also looks briefly at the naval contests between Carthage and Sicilians in the west. Chapter 10 considers the short-lived Theban naval experiment in the mid-fourth century, a negative counterexample to the more successful eras of Athenian and Spartan domination of the sea. The Thebans could not achieve full possession of sea power because they, lacking a military consciousness, kept their navy in reserve as a “fleet-in-being,” never employing it in combat against the resurgent Athenian navy or other rivals. But once the Macedonians entered the picture, no one else stood a chance of gaining sea power. Nash devotes considerable space to Demosthenes’ verbal attacks against Philip and less space to the Athenian naval conflict with Antipater in the Lamian War, the chronological end point of the book. But he mentions nothing of Alexander’s maritime strategy or lack thereof, an omission about which he warns the reader in the Introduction (7)—but a disappointing omission nonetheless.
Chapter 11 is a reminder that the sea also shaped smaller, non-hegemonic city-states. Corinth had interests at sea extending from its strategic location. Corcyra and Chios possessed large navies that, even though they served a supporting role to larger powers, exhibited a maritime consciousness. Nash draws similar conclusions about the impact of the sea on Aegina from literary evidence and on Leucas from ship shed remains. These examples demonstrate the different types of sea power and how maritime interactions shaped the Greeks’ identities.
“This,” says Nash, expanding on the diversity of manifestations of a maritime consciousness, “does not mean citizens of a polis needed any specific love of the sea to have saltwater flowing through their veins or any other such notions. Rather, it is the ability to see how the maritime realm could be engaged with, be it through trade and all that it required: ships, regulations, overseas markets, protection from piracy, alliance with a neighbour, or access to specific bodies of water” (214). The discussion of each small city-state is brief, leading to an acknowledgement in the Conclusion that there is potential for future studies on sea power in ancient Greece. Indeed, although Nash covers much of the literary evidence (except for the omissions listed above) and a comparable amount of archaeological evidence, there is still more that he could draw from the epigraphic record.
Except for the occasional typographical error, Nash writes in an accessible manner. The book’s emphasis on sea power and its inclusion of concepts drawn from modern naval studies brings fresh perspectives to the ancient context. Since his target audience is scholars of the ancient world, Nash conveniently collects the unfamiliar terminology into Appendix 1 (“Glossary of Terms”). The work, therefore, joins together the disciplines of maritime studies and ancient history. The reader should come to appreciate the pervasive influence of the sea not only on strategy but on the everyday lives of the Greeks.
Notes
[1] One exception to the claim that naval historians dismiss the ancient world is Andrew Lambert, Seapower States (New Haven, 2018), which appears once in Nash’s footnotes.
[2] Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000); James Beresford, History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity. Ancient Sailing Season (Leiden, 2012); David Blackman and Boris Rankov, eds, Shipsheds of the Ancient Mediterranean (Cambridge, 2013); Hans Van Wees, Ships and Silver, Taxes and Tribute: A Fiscal History of Archaic Athens (London, 2015).
[3] This is essentially a reiteration of John Nash, “Sea Power in the Peloponnesian War,” Naval War College Review 71 (2018), 119-139.