The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece -- and Western Civilization

by Barry Strauss

  In three years he had turned Athens from a backwater into the first sea power in Greece, the proud possessor of two hundred triremes. He had built a fleet and hammered out a plan to save the city from the Persian invasion that he saw coming. And he had turned himself into both the first man in Athens and the kingpin of the Greek navy. Not bad for a man who came from outside the charmed circle of the Athenian aristocracy, a man who put his pragmatism bluntly:

  I may not know how to tune the lyre or to handle the harp but I know how to take a small and unknown city and make it famous and great.

  Not bad for a man who appalled the old guard, a man about whom the philosopher Plato later complained that he turned the Athenians from steadfast infantrymen into a sailors’ rabble. But then, Themistocles was a champion in the game of broad-shouldered, no-holds-barred fighting that was Athenian politics. It was a new game, invented when Themistocles was just a teenager. In 508 B.C., a revolution had turned Athens into one of history’s first democracies.

  Only a democracy could have put together the manpower to staff two hundred triremes—forty thousand men—and the willpower to use them well. As Herodotus says, democracy energized Athens:

  When the Athenians lived under a tyranny they were no better at war than any of their neighbors, but after they got rid of the tyrants they were the first by far. This proves that when they were oppressed they fought badly on purpose as if they were slaving away for a master, but after they were liberated they each were eager to get the job done for his own sake.

  Themistocles was that rare thing in a democracy, a leader. He had no fear of speaking truths to the people. By the same token, he knew that a straight line is not always the shortest distance between two points. He was known for his shrewdness and his shock tactics, or what the Greeks called deinotes (pronounced “day-NO-tays”). Deinotes can mean a quick remark or a catastrophe; it can be applied to an orator or a lightning bolt; it can be used as a compliment or a criticism. All of these shades of meaning fitted Themistocles.

  Themistocles was brilliant, farsighted, creative, tireless, magnanimous, courageous, and eloquent. Yet it is also true that during the course of his career he lied, cheated, blustered, and threatened; grabbed credit for others’ ideas; manipulated religion; took bribes and extorted protection money; served up insult and pursued vendetta; and ended his days in exile, a traitor. In short, Themistocles was no angel, but seraphim could not have saved the Greeks.

  In the spring of 480 B.C., the members of the Greek alliance against Persia, the Hellenic League, met at the Isthmus of Corinth to chart strategy. The Persians were coming, invading Greece in force. It was the latest stage in a war that had already lasted a generation.

  The war began when Athens insulted the mighty Persian Empire by promising to become its ally around 508 B.C. but then reneged. Athenian ambassadors to the empire made a symbolic gift of earth and water as a sign of submission, but the Athenian government refused to support them. The quarrel worsened when Athens later threw two Persian ambassadors into a pit for condemned criminals, which was probably the prelude to execution. Much worse, Athens next provided military aid to the Ionian Revolt of 499 to 494 B.C., a rebellion of Persia’s Greek and Carian subjects in western Anatolia. The Greeks had lived in Anatolia for centuries; the Carians went back even further, and might have been related to the Trojans. In the Ionian Revolt, the Athenians briefly captured the Persian provincial capital of Sardis and started a fire there that burned out of control and destroyed the temple of the goddess Cybele.

  Persia put down the Ionian Revolt in 494 B.C. The decisive battle was fought at sea near Lade, an island off the coast of Anatolia and near the Greek city-state of Miletus, the ringleader of the revolt. Now it was time for revenge on Athens. King Darius of Persia sent an armada across the Aegean Sea to invade Athens in 490 B.C. But at the battle of Marathon, in Athenian territory twenty-four miles from the city of Athens, Athenian infantrymen crushed Persia’s soldiers and saved their country. Themistocles was one of the Athenians in the line of battle.

  Now, ten years later, the Persians were coming back, this time in massive numbers. The Greeks who met at the Isthmus of Corinth in the spring of 480 B.C. came up with a defense strategy that had three basic elements. First, since Persia would attack both by land and sea, the Greeks would respond with an army and a navy. The Peloponnese would provide most of the infantrymen, since Athens would devote all its manpower to its big navy. Second, since Persia was attacking Athens via northern Greece rather than by island-hopping across the Aegean, the allies would mount a forward defense in northern Greece. It was better to try to stop Persia there than at the gates of Athens. Third, time was on the Greeks’ side. For political reasons, the Persian king wanted a quick victory, and for practical reasons, the Persian quartermasters could not supply their huge force for very long. Therefore, the Greeks might well have intended to drag out the war until the Persians gave up.

  The Greeks began their defense in the north. Their first thrust consisted of an army of ten thousand men to hold the mountain pass known as the Vale of Tempe, which runs between Macedonia and Thessaly. Themistocles led the force. But when he got to Tempe in June or July of 480 B.C., he discovered two other passes nearby. Since it would be impossible to close all three passes to Persia, he withdrew southward. Tempe had been a failure of intelligence—a sign of how little the Greeks knew about their own country and how much darkness ancient strategists often worked in.

  But Artemisium was a strategist’s triumph. If Themistocles did not choose it as a base, he quickly grasped its importance. It was close enough to Thermopylae to allow a coordinated land-sea strategy. The Greek fleet at Artemisium would keep Persian reinforcements from arriving by sea and cutting off the Greek army holding the pass at Thermopylae.

  The Greeks could have stationed their fleet closer to Thermopylae, which is forty miles away from Artemisium. But nearness was not the only issue. Nor was the potential battlefield, since the straits at Artemisium are ten miles wide, and the Greeks might have preferred fighting in narrower waters, where Persia could not deploy its full number of ships. Yet Artemisium offered other advantages.

  Artemisium was the region’s best harbor because it was large, sheltered, and rich in sources of drinking water. By occupying it themselves, the Greeks denied Artemisium to the enemy. That meant that the Persians could not land on the strategic island of Euboea without a challenge from the Greek fleet. Nor could the Persian fleet bypass the island without risking a Greek challenge.

  Since triremes were both too fragile and too uncomfortable for a long stay at sea, trireme fleets did not mount blockades in the modern sense of the word. Rather, they moored in a harbor near the enemy and ventured out to challenge him. In order to be ready, they used scouts both on land and sea to follow enemy movements and to signal information.

  From Artemisium the Greeks could challenge the Persian fleet’s southward advance in either of two directions. The rocky east coast of the island of Euboea is hostile to sailors, so the Persians were likely to avoid it. The west coast of Euboea is gentler. Its harbors open onto an inland waterway between Euboea and the Greek mainland, a sheltered passage for the Persian navy from northern Greece to Athens. It is completely navigable even if, at about its midpoint, the channel narrows to a width of forty yards of water, a sound called the Euripos. Hence, the Greeks at Artemisium expected a Persian move to the southwest.

  Recognizing the Greeks’ plan, the Persians coordinated their attack on Artemisium and on Thermopylae. Although they had not planned matters quite so precisely, the land and sea battles there turned out to be fought on precisely the same three days in late August, 480 B.C.

  The Greeks would have rejoiced to stop Persia via the joint operations at Thermopylae and Artemisium. But they did not need to fulfill that tall order; merely bloodying Persia and slowing it down would be a Greek success. To force casualties and delay would shake Persia’s resolve while it would give the Greeks a taste of Persian tac
tics—invaluable knowledge for use in the next battle. And so, the Greek navy sat at Artemisium and waited for the barbarian.

  Artemisium was usually a sleepy place: a scene of blue water, a sandy beach, and dark green and silver-gray groves of pine and olive, in August dotted with orange clumps of late-blooming crocuses. The nearest town was eight miles away, but on a hill beside the bay (today’s Pevki Bay) stood a little temple of Artemis Proseoia, that is, Artemis Who Looks Toward the East, and the name suited Greece’s chief naval base against the threat from the East.

  Yet like all forward bases, Artemisium offered advantage and danger in equal measure. If the Greek fleet faltered, its men would be adrift in hostile country. That is, if they survived. Persia wanted to smash the enemy navy and gain control of the sea-lanes southward, which meant crippling Greece’s boats and killing its sailors. The Persians wanted to wipe out every last Greek, down to the Spartan priest whose job it was to keep alight the sacred fire brought from the altar of Zeus back in Sparta.

  The Greeks’ exposed position was risk enough, but worse still was the Greek navy’s size. In 480 B.C., the Greek world stretched from Anatolia to the Bay of Naples; there was even a smattering of Greeks as far east as the Caucasus and as far west as Spain. All told, there were fifteen hundred Greek city-states. Yet only a relative handful—only thirty-one city-states—joined the coalition against Persia.

  In fact, more Greek city-states fought on the other side. Persia was too strong and loyalty to the idea of Greece too weak to make the Hellenic League any more powerful. Athens, Sparta, and the few other city-states that stood up to Persia spoke harshly of Greek traitors, but most Greeks would have shrugged their shoulders at the charge.

  Of the thirty-one members of the Hellenic League, a mere fourteen city-states manned the warships at Artemisium, for a total of 280 warships—271 triremes and 9 penteconters. Later, Athens sent 53 ships as reinforcements, making a total of 333 warships. Athens provided 180 ships at Artemisium, by far the largest contingent; the ships were partly manned by Athens’s allies in Plataea. The next largest unit was the 40 ships from Corinth, followed by 20 from Megara, 20 more from Athens manned by crews from Chalcis, 18 from Aegina, and eight smaller contingents.

  Opposite the Greeks sailed a navy that vastly outnumbered them. The Persians had no fewer than 1,207 triremes when they set out on their expedition, and another 120 joined them as they added new allies on their advance through northern Greece toward Artemisium—for a total of 1,327 ships.

  Both fleets had to cope with the strains and cracks of multinational armadas. But the differences among the Greek city-states were small compared to the contrasts in the floating tower of Babel that was the Persian fleet. It combined Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks, Cypriots, and various non-Greek peoples of Anatolia, from Carians to Pamphylians. With all its different languages, communication alone was no small problem for the fleet, let alone coordinating operations at sea.

  Four Persian nobles, including two princes, held the supreme command. Yet there was not a single Persian ship in their navy. Every ship carried a mix of marines and archers, including some Persians, but not one of the rowers or seamen was Persian. The Persians were not seafarers.

  The Greeks, by contrast, practically had salt water running in their veins, so wedded were they to the sea. The Odyssey, that quintessential sailor’s story, was one of the two national epics known to every Greek boy. But the Greek coalition against Persia was led by a land power—Sparta. By tradition Greece’s greatest city-state, Sparta prided itself on its military virtue. The Greek alliance was known as the Hellenic League. Sparta insisted on holding the supreme command at sea, as it did on land. In the interests of Greek unity, Athens agreed. Yet with its two hundred warships, Athens had by far the largest and strongest Greek navy. Although a Spartan named Eurybiades son of Eurycleides was commander of the Greek fleet, Themistocles amounted to its main strategist.

  But his genius was hardly evident at the outset. In the first naval clash of the war, the Greeks sent three ships north to reconnoiter; they were based on the island of Sciathos, about fifteen miles northeast of Artemisium. A Persian contingent advanced toward them, and the Greek ships fled at the first sight of it. Two of them were captured, and the third was beached and abandoned by its crew. The abandoned ship was Athenian, and the two captured ships were from Aegina and Troezen. The Persians focused on the Troezenian ship, because it was the first captured Greek vessel of the war. They picked through the dozen marines until they found the best-looking one. Then they hauled him to the prow and slit his throat. They considered it lucky to sacrifice the best-looking man among their first prisoners. Besides, the victim’s name was Leon, “lion,” and it was auspicious to kill the king of the beasts.

  The fleet at Artemisium learned the news via fire signals transmitted from a mountaintop on Sciathos to a mountaintop on Euboea. In the clear skies of the Mediterranean, fire signals could be seen from far off. They were visible as smoke signals during the day and as beacons at night. Modern tests show that the signals were visible between mountaintops up to a distance of two hundred miles.

  Having seen the signal, the fleet withdrew southward into the Euboean channel, all the way to the city of Chalcis. They left scouts in the hills above Artemisium to report Persian movements to them. Scouts had to be fast runners and good horsemen—for those occasions when horses were available. They had to travel light and not call attention to themselves, so they might be armed only with a dagger.

  Where, we wonder, was the bold Themistocles? Herodotus says that the Greek move was just plain panic. If he is right, then presumably Themistocles had been overruled by the other generals. But there may be other explanations of the Greek withdrawal. Perhaps the Greeks suspected a bold Persian move via Sciathos down the east coast of Euboea, and they were racing to beat them. Another possibility might be that, with their local knowledge, the Greeks could tell that a dangerous storm was brewing and so had withdrawn to a sheltered position.

  Meanwhile, the Persians were heading toward Artemisium, sailing southward down the coast of northeastern Greece, opposite Mount Pelion. The rugged Pelion peninsula rises abruptly from the sea. Unable to find a harbor large enough for all their ships, the Persians were forced to moor their fleet in eight lines parallel to the coast, near Cape Sepias. That in turn left them vulnerable to what Herodotus calls a “monster storm.” It lasted three days, until the heavens bowed to the prayers of Persia’s priests. Most Greeks saw the storm as the work of Boreas, god of the north wind.

  For months after the storm, gold and silver cups and even treasure chests washed up on shore, making one local Greek landowner a millionaire. Herodotus reports that, by conservative estimates, the Persians lost four hundred warships and innumerable sailors. The size of the fleet had been reduced from 1,327 to about 927 warships. It was a terrific blow, but the Persian fleet was still enormous.

  Having recovered, the Persian fleet rounded the Pelion peninsula and arrived opposite Artemisium, at a harbor called Aphetae, the legendary starting point of Jason and the Argonauts. Aphetae is probably best thought of as the Persians’ naval command post; their fleet was too bulky for any one harbor and so was probably spread out over several.

  By now their scouts had rushed news to the Greeks at Chalcis of the disastrous storm. No doubt, the tale grew with the telling. Convinced that the Persians were ruined, the Greeks said a prayer of thanksgiving to the god of the sea, Poseidon, whom they now dubbed Poseidon the Savior. Then they hurried back north to Artemisium. They were in for a shock.

  When the Greeks at Artemisium looked across the straits at the enemy and saw how big Persia’s fleet remained in spite of the storm, they panicked. There was talk of a retreat, and that, in turn, galvanized the local Euboeans. Unable to convince Eurybiades to stay long enough for them to evacuate women and children, the Euboeans turned to Themistocles. He proved willing to stay—for a price. The Euboeans paid him the huge sum of thirty talents of silver, enough m
oney to employ a hundred workmen for six years, or to buy a thousand slaves, or to pay the crews of thirty triremes for a season’s work. After turning over five talents to Eurybiades and three talents to the Corinthian commander, Adimantus son of Ocytus, Themistocles had twenty-two talents left for himself, a fact that he did not advertise. The Greek fleet stayed at Artemisium.

  We might say that the Euboeans paid Themistocles and his colleagues a bribe, but the ancient Greeks would have called it a gift. Their language had no word for bribe, but their culture valued gift-giving. Homer’s heroes heaped up gold, bulls, and women for their feats of prowess; Herodotus’s politicians expected to have their palms greased. Contemporaries accepted the practice; indeed, Athenian law winked at a public servant who took private money as long as he used it in the best interests of the people.

  Around this time, the Greeks at Artemisium got a windfall. Fifteen Persian stragglers mistakenly made for Artemisium instead of Aphetae and so sailed right into enemy hands. The Greeks got not only fifteen triremes but also three important Persian commanders, including the governor of Aeolis, a region in northwest Anatolia that included the city of Cyme, a major naval harbor, as well as a Carian tyrant and a commander from Cyprus. After interrogation, they were shipped off in chains to the Isthmus of Corinth.

  Meanwhile, the Persians at Aphetae came up with a battle plan. They needed a stratagem, they reasoned, because if they simply came out and fought, the terrified Greeks would turn and flee. So, to prevent a Greek escape, the Persians set a trap. The Persians would send two hundred ships around the east coast of Euboea; once they rounded the southern tip of the island, they would double back along the west coast and emerge west of Artemisium. Then, at a signal, the main Persian fleet would pounce.

  Clever though it seems, their plan betrays a landlubber’s mentality. It was one thing to turn an enemy’s flank on a level plain, quite another to do so along Euboea’s windswept and treacherous eastern coast. Besides, a deserter warned the Greeks what Persia was up to. Scyllias of Scione was a northern Greek in Persia’s service who was known as the best diver of his day. Herodotus scoffs at reports that he swam the tenmile straits—underwater!—to reach the Greeks; instead, he says, Scyllias probably stole across in a boat. But the Greeks had primitive snorkels, and perhaps by surfacing every now and then, Scyllias did manage what was mainly an underwater swim. In any case, he delivered the news both of Persia’s losses in the storm and of the dispatch of the two hundred ships.