The Athenians who rowed home from Amorgos in late June 322 BC were towing the wrecks of three or four of their own ships. To anyone watching from shore, this looked like victory - the side with the wrecks was usually the side that had won. Athens celebrated for two or three days. Then the rest of the fleet arrived, and people began to do the math: Macedonian admiral Cleitus had let them keep their wrecks, and that meant something else had happened. What happened off Amorgos was the end of Athenian sea power, the end of Athenian democracy, and the quiet beginning of the Hellenistic age.
Alexander the Great died in Babylon on June 11, 323 BC, in his thirty-third year, possibly of fever and possibly of poison. The Greek city-states he had bound to Macedonian hegemony had never accepted that hegemony cheerfully, and Athens had a particular grievance: Alexander's Exiles Decree of 324 BC ordered the return of all political exiles, which meant returning the island of Samos to its native population after sixty years of Athenian colonization. The Athenians had been preparing for war before the news of Alexander's death even reached them. The Lamian War, sometimes called the Hellenic War, was a coalition led by Athens against the Macedonian regent Antipater. The allies won early - they defeated Antipater on land and besieged him in the fortified town of Lamia in central Greece - but Macedonian reinforcements were already coming.
Athens still had money, even in decline. The fleet she put to sea in 323-322 BC numbered around 170 ships under the admiral Euetion: two quinqueremes (the city's biggest), some quadriremes, and the rest triremes. The Macedonian fleet, under an admiral with the spectacular name of Cleitus the White, had two hundred and forty ships. Cleitus had been with Alexander; he was a survivor of the Companion Cavalry tradition, brought into naval command for reasons that had more to do with politics than seamanship. The Macedonian fleet's job was to bring reinforcements from Asia Minor across the Hellespont and into Greece. The Athenian fleet's job was to stop them. Both fleets were rowed by free men - Athenian rowers were citizens of the lowest property class, the thetes, and their political weight in the assembly was directly tied to their service at the oars. To row in the fleet was to vote with your back.
The sources on the battle are unsatisfyingly thin. Diodorus Siculus says only that Cleitus defeated Euetion in two naval battles 'and destroyed a large number of the ships of the enemy near the islands that are called the Echinades.' The Parian Marble, a chronicle inscribed on stone in Paros, mentions a battle near Amorgos won by the Macedonians. Plutarch records the eccentric detail that Cleitus afterward presented himself as Poseidon, although he had only sunk three or four of the Athenian ships - which is the kind of comment a satirist makes about a victory that should have been larger. Modern historians argue about the sequence: was Amorgos before or after the Battle of the Echinades? Were there two battles or three? What is clear is that when the fleets met somewhere in the southern Aegean, Cleitus had a heavy numerical advantage. The historian John R. Hale has proposed that Euetion may have surrendered early, with assurances that Athens would no longer challenge Macedonia at sea - which would explain Cleitus's strange generosity in releasing the wrecks. The Athenian aristocracy had never wanted the war, and Euetion was an aristocrat.
There is a particular pathos to the next part of the story. The Athenian fleet rowed home toward Piraeus, the wrecks under tow. From Sounion, watchers signaled to Athens that the fleet was returning with prizes. The city assumed victory. For two or three days, the agora celebrated - sacrifices, processions, perhaps choruses singing the old ode to Themistocles and Salamis. Then the ships came up the Long Walls and the truth came out. Plutarch, never one to soften an irony, lingers on the moment. The decisive sea battle of the Lamian War had been lost so courteously that the city held a victory parade for it before realizing what it was.
What followed was worse. The remnants of the Athenian fleet were destroyed at the Echinades islands a few weeks later. The land coalition collapsed at the Battle of Crannon in August 322 BC. Antipater dictated peace terms. Twelve thousand of the poorest Athenian citizens - the thetes, the rowers, the men whose votes had funded the war - were disenfranchised and expelled. Voting rights were restricted to wealthy citizens. A Macedonian garrison was installed on Munychia hill in the harbor of Piraeus. Athenian democracy, which had lasted nearly two hundred years since the reforms of Cleisthenes, ended at Amorgos as much as anywhere else. The battle is sometimes proposed as one of three events that occasioned the carving of the Nike of Samothrace, the windswept marble victory who now stands at the head of the Daru staircase in the Louvre. Whose victory she commemorates is still argued; if she stands for Amorgos, she stands for Cleitus, not for Athens.
36.50 N, 25.54 E. Amorgos is the easternmost of the Cyclades, a long narrow island running northeast-southwest about 80 nm southeast of Athens. The exact location of the 322 BC sea battle is unknown but was somewhere in the open Aegean east of the island, in waters now traversed by ferries and tankers between Piraeus and the eastern Mediterranean. Nearest airport is Naxos (LGNX), 35 nm northwest; Santorini (LGSR) is 30 nm southwest; Athens (LGAV) is 110 nm northwest. The seascape from altitude is classically Cycladic - small islands of brown and white scattered across deep blue water - and Amorgos itself is recognizable by its long thin shape and steep coastlines. Best visibility is morning before the meltemi haze; the meltemi wind that builds afternoons can produce mild turbulence at low altitude.