Taking distance from previous studies where naval warfare in Classical period is considered as an Athenian uniqueness concerning her military results, this paper aims to review the battles which took place during the Peloponnesian War from a different perspective. After a brief analysis of the Athenian military tactics, understood as their specificity difficult to implement unconditionally, we try to shed light on the Others opted for their ways to conduct naval warfare.

Bronze Age excavation finds offer a great number of information relating the naval architecture of Greek ships. Unfortunately depictions with war character are quite limited. In addition, the paucity of naval battles on illustrations and texts raise many difficulties to the study of naval warfare. Warriors onboard, who consisted a primitive type of marine corps of Late Bronze Age Greece, offers an obstructive but very exiting area for research.

Claude Mossé’s overall judgement on the Athenian navy in the fourth century BC, particularly her appraisal of the navy’s role in the narrative about Athens’s decline, consisted of a positive as well as a negative element. On the one hand, Mossé acknowledged that Athens had continued to possess a strong fleet, but on the other hand, she maintained that lack of adequate financial resources had inhibited the Athenians from making full use of the fleet’s potential. For her, the patient, so to speak, was not the fleet per se, but the attending financial infrastructure. Putting that diagnosis to the test, accordingly, has become a central concern of subsequent appraisals of Athens’s naval organisation in the fourth century, focussing, as they do, on the characteristics distinguishing systems of naval resource acquirement and management as well as on their effectiveness. To some extent, this paper continues this line of inquiry. However, in pursuing its principal aim of registering continuities and changes in the naval organisation, it steers clear of the decline discourse – a construct attributable originally to Demosthenes. The focus here is instead on three parallel-running but also intersecting processes: restoration, incrementation and transformation. All three, this paper argues, were outgrowths of both public and private initiatives. And all three transformed, not only Athens’s way of deploying its fleet, but also Athenian society and its economy. By 325 BC, in conclusion, the navy had grown as strong as – indeed arguably stronger than – that of 431. Yet, the institutional setting of which it consisted differed substantially from its fifth-century predecessor.

Just before the millennium, prospects for Greek-owned shipping looked grim for the first time after many years of almost uninterrupted – and always impressive – expansion. The age of Greek-owned ships coupled with its heavy specialisation in ship types that found themselves in a sea of regulatory changes seemed as a combination of challenges that Greek shipping would not be able to handle this time. Yet, the legendary flexibility and market “feel” of the Greek-shipping community led to the Greek-owned fleet not only transiting successfully into the 21st century at the leading position in world shipping hierarchy, but also building solidly on its existing strengths while venturing into new areas. This chapter reviews this course focusing on changes in the specialisation and age of the Greek-owned fleet.

Several, if not many, scholars and historians have written about the exploits of the Athenian Navy during the 5th century BC, especially, during the Persian Wars, (480-479) the pentekontaetia period (478-432) through to the Peloponnesian War period (431-404), until the destruction of the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami (405 BC). This interest in the Athenian Navy and its achievements in the Classical period has led to the writing of several specialist works on that phenomenon; and we note that no general work on Greek history is deemed complete without an excursus on the Athenian Navy and how it helped save Greece from the tyranny of Persia. Our intention in this paper is not to trod the same path and recount the exploits of the Athenian navy, but rather to attempt to account for the transformation of the Athenian navy from a minnow to a leviathan within a twenty year period. We shall, through a critical examination of extant primary sources, primarily Herodotus and, to a lesser extent, Plutarch, argue, firstly, that in terms of naval strength and sea power, Athens was a minnow as at 499 BC, and secondly that it was through a recognition of this deficiency and at the urging of Themistocles that Athens commissioned a fleet to bolster its sea power and naval strength, and thus became a leviathan as at 480 BC when the Persian Wars broke out in earnest in main land Greece. Keywords: minnow, leviathan, pentekonter, trireme, Themistocles, Persian Wars, Athenian Navy

The transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age (LH IIIB-C) in the eastern Mediterranean, Aegean, and Near East was marked by the destruction of empires and the migratory movement of populations. This time of upheaval was also marked by a change in the iconography of warriors and warfare, particularly in Egypt and in the Aegean world, including the first representations of true naval combat. Warriors in feathered headdresses, never before seen in Helladic or Egyptian art, are shown on Aegean pottery and in Egyptian relief taking part in battles on both land and sea, and the Helladic oared galley (Wedde’s Type V) makes its first appearance at this time as an instrument of naval warfare. This paper investigates these earliest representations of naval combat, with a special emphasis on the appearance and employment of new maritime technology and its effect on naval warfare. Also considered are what changes in fighting, if any, had to be made in order to adapt to this early form of ship-based combat.

The historiography ου Greek commercial shipping for the period prior to the mid-eighteenth century is quite limited.1 Ια general terms, the commercial and maritime activities of Greeks from the fall of Constantinople (1453) to the early eighteenth century are perceived as being of relatively minor importance and limited most1yto playing a subservient role to the trade networks of Western Ευτορεεα countries struggling for supremacy in the Levant. Υet there are plenty of indications that Greeks were actually very active seamen at that time. This evidence is heterogeneous and by and large remains unexplored; as a consequence, we are not ίτι a position to reach solid conclusions. Ια order to reach such general conclusions οα Greek commercial shipping we require extensive research based οτι a substantial corpus of data. The aim of this paper is to systematise and assess sources that might be useful to this end.

"The field of maritime history in the Mediterranean naturally bears on the discussion of the grand strategy of ancient empires in the region, but has yet to be investigated from such a perspective. The proposed paper will focus on the Classical Aegean, seeking to establish the extent to which the Athenian Empire’s efforts in acquiring and maintaining its mammoth maritime capabilities may be ascribed to a grand strategy at work – basically defined by modern scholars as ‘the constant and intelligent reassessment of the polity’s ends and means’ (Kennedy 1991). Among other aspects, the paper will examine Athenian conduct during times of routine and crisis, evaluating the presence of such grand strategic tenets as the efficient use of manpower; central military inventories; muster roles and orders of battle; information services; support services; logistical organization; a central decision-making process; rational objectives of war; and, finally, discrimination between wars of survival and wars of glory (Whittaker 2004). Mostly based on the examination of the Roman legions, ancient historians usually reject the viability of grand strategy in antiquity. Classical Athens may well put this notion to the test."