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

by Barry Strauss

  The plain of Attica, as the territory of the city-state of Athens is called, stretches out below the mountains. Most of Attica is made up of farmland and forests; the urban space of Athens in 480 B.C. was tiny, a distance that would take an hour’s walk from end to end. In the clear blue light of September, the Persians’ advance guard could make out the columns of the temples on the Athenian Acropolis, the center of the city of Athens. The sound of the wind blowing through the trees might stir them to picture the soft, city beds that were about to replace the pine needles on which they had earlier bivouacked.

  The water of the Saronic Gulf and the distant mountains of the Peloponnese serve as a backdrop. Well within the Persians’ view and much closer at hand is the island of Salamis, which is separated only by a narrow channel from the mainland of Athens. As the Persians crested the mountains of Attica, they might have imagined that total victory lay in their grasp. The main obstacle consisted of some three hundred triremes, the Greek fleet that had regrouped in Salamis harbor after the battle at Artemisium. The Persian navy had sailed down the west coast of Euboea, looting as it went. The Persians had a Greek pilot to guide them through the twisting waterway, one Salganeus of Boeotia. But they were so dismayed at the narrowness of the Euripos strait that they had him executed on the grounds of misleading them—unfairly, since this was indeed the best route.

  The Persian fleet finally rounded the tip of Attica at Cape Sunium, and now it was moored at Phaleron, about three miles south of the Acropolis. Meanwhile, about forty miles southwest of Athens, a Greek army hurried to build a wall at the narrow Isthmus of Corinth in order to block the Persians by land. But all that might seem far away on the morning when the Great King’s men would head for Athens and revenge.

  Athens is only three miles from the sea, but it does not feel like a port. Rather, the ancient city’s hills—the hills of the Muses, the Nymphs, the Areopagus, and of course, the Acropolis—remind a visitor of the mountains in whose foothills Athens sits. Indeed, the city is enfolded by mountains: to the southeast, Mount Hymettus; to the northeast, Mount Pentele; to the northwest, Mount Parnes; and to the southwest, Mount Aigaleos. Only due south does Athens open to the sea. There, at the shore three miles away, a traveler enters a different world, one of the light and air of the Greek islands.

  Athens might have reminded Hermotimus of the city of his birth. Ancient Pedasa has been tentatively identified with the site known today as Gökçeler Castle, a few miles northwest of the ancient site of Halicarnassus. Gökçeler Castle sits high in the hills of the Bodrum peninsula, set in a classic Aegean mountain landscape. Its acropolis is a steep, defensible hill. The imposing line of the fortification walls, with their massive, well-worked stones, is still visible, despite the wild growth of trees and bushes. It was good land for grazing sheep and goats, good land for terracing for olive cultivation, good land for bird hunting. Quiet in the hills, Pedasa seems a world away from the sea, although the water, only a few miles away, is visible in the distance, at least from the top of the citadel.

  Back in Athens, Hermotimus might have shepherded the royal princes on a tour of the city, or what was left of it. He might have cited the signs of Persian pillage as proof that revenge is sweet. And Hermotimus could have cited his own experience as a case in point.

  Just a few months earlier, while at Sardis in the winter of 481–480 B.C., the eunuch had made a side trip to the Greek coastal city of Atarneus. There, he happened to run into a Greek from the island of Chios named Panionius. He was the very man who, years earlier, had castrated Hermotimus. Indeed, Panionius castrated good-looking boys as a profession. Now was the moment of Hermotimus’s revenge. He lied to Panionius, claiming that he had no hard feelings, since Panionius’s knife had cut a path to wealth and power at the Persian court. Indeed, Hermotimus invited Panionius to share his success by moving from Chios to Atarneus—Panionius and his entire family.

  Panionius fell for the ploy and moved his family, at which point Hermotimus struck. He revealed his true anger at having been castrated. Panionius, said Hermotimus, had made him “a nothing.” Now Hermotimus unveiled his plan for revenge. Hermotimus forced Panionius to castrate his four sons, and then he made the boys do likewise to their father. There is a hint in Herodotus that it was more than tit-for-tat; that while Hermotimus lost only his testicles, Panionius and his sons each was left with only a hole for urination. This savage act of reprisal suggests the sort of bloody justice—if not the precise punishment—that Xerxes had in mind for the Athenians.

  At the end of the sixth year of his reign, and four months after he had crossed the Hellespont, the Great King finally rode into Athens. The Persians no doubt planned their usual penalty for rebels and recalcitrants. Athenian men would be put to the sword, women would be raped, children rounded up. Human dragnets would be launched; long lines of men would scour the countryside and haul in prisoners. Then tens of thousands of Athenian survivors of Persia’s vengeance would be marched or rowed off eastward, far from the Aegean, to places on the Persian Gulf or in the mountains of Central Asia, in order to serve the glory of the Great King. There they would fret over future generations and their precarious ability to pass on ever dimmer memories of Athens to their young.

  It was all a familiar pattern by now, from the bloodshed to the uprooting to the lamentations. It was the fate, after the failure of the Ionian Revolt in 494 B.C., of such islands as Chios and Lesbos and of the cities of Eretria and Miletus and, many years earlier, of other cities in the ancient Near East. But it never happened in Athens, because when the Persians arrived, there was almost no one there. Nearly the entire territory of Attica, the one-thousand-square-mile area that was roughly equal in size to the American state of Rhode Island or the British county of Hampshire, had been stripped of its people. From the mountains of Marathon to the lowlands of Eleusis, from the silver mines of Laurium to the harbor of Piraeus, Attica was nearly empty.

  It was not easy to evacuate a Greek city-state. One other city had tried to do so with mixed results. Rather than submit to Persia, in 540 B.C. the people of Phocaea in Ionia voted to move lock, stock, and barrel. But there was enough resistance that they had to drop a lump of iron into the sea and all swear not to return to Phocaea until it floated again—that is, never. They also put a curse on anyone who stayed behind. Even so, more than half of the population of the city broke their oath, braved the curse, and sailed back home to become Persian subjects. The remainder eventually resettled in Italy, after many troubles.

  Athenians in 480 B.C. faced similar temptations and greater problems. Phocaea was a small place; Athens was one of the largest city-states in the Greek world. There were probably about 150,000 men, women, and children in Attica in 480 B.C. And most of them would leave.

  They would go to three destinations. Women and children were meant to head across the Saronic Gulf to Troezen, a city-state on the east coast of the Peloponnese, but some also went to the Saronic Gulf island of Aegina. Aegina and Troezen are each about a day’s sail from Athens. Athenian men of fighting age—in this emergency, possibly ages eighteen through fifty-nine—headed for Salamis; that island was, it seems, the preferred destination also for the elderly and for whatever household goods could be transported. Salamis lies off the coast of Attica, only about a mile away.

  Like Aegina and Troezen, Salamis is accessible by sea. So far as is known, Athens was evacuated entirely by ship. The veterans of Artemisium had no time to rest before going back to sea, ferrying their countrymen to safety. As for the evacuees, anecdotes survive of tearful dockside leave-takings.

  Troezen was a logical choice for Athenian relocation. Troezen had long-standing connections to Athens. Myth made Troezen the maternal home of Theseus, Athens’s legendary hero-king. The island of Aegina was not as obvious a destination, since until Xerxes’ invasion, it had been Athens’s archenemy. But Aegina had closed ranks with the anti-Persian Greeks, and perhaps now, in 480 B.C., the island wished to make amends for its past. The welcome give
n to Athenian evacuees was a good start.

  Salamis was the key to Athens’s strategy. Unlike Troezen and Aegina, Salamis was Athenian territory. Originally independent, Salamis had a strategic location, skirting both Attica and the neighboring city-state of Megara, which made it much fought over by its neighbors on the mainland before finally being conquered by Athens not long after 600 B.C. In time, Athenian families settled on the island. A few years before 480 B.C. one of Salamis’s most famous sons was born: the Athenian tragedian Euripides.

  The view from the Athenian Acropolis makes the strategic value of Salamis clear. The narrow straits separating Salamis from the mainland lie due west of the Acropolis. The rugged outline of the island rises beyond a sliver of water. Standing on the Acropolis, a person feels almost as if he could grab hold of the island. By evacuating to Salamis, the Athenians found a base within sight of home.

  Although the Athenian relocation had already begun before August 480 B.C., it accelerated with the news of the fall of Thermopylae. The Peloponnesians had promised that if they had to retreat from the pass, they would make a stand in Boeotia. Under no circumstance would they leave Athens to find its own way. Yet the Peloponnesians had reneged. Their armies were forming a defensive line at the Isthmus of Corinth, gateway to the Peloponnese, that is, about forty miles to the southwest of Athens. The allies had deserted Athens. The Athenians had to settle for a Peloponnesian agreement that, after Artemisium, the Greek fleet would regroup at Salamis rather than at a harbor at the Isthmus. But the Peloponnesians, who were itching to get back closer to home, did not promise to actually fight a battle at Salamis. Since that was precisely what the Athenians wanted to do, and since Athens had the leverage of the largest fleet in Greece, disagreement lay ahead.

  Alone and abandoned on land, the Athenians decided to evacuate their homeland and make a stand at Salamis. This was no hasty or eleventh-hour plan. It had been decided on before the Athenian fleet went north to Artemisium, perhaps nearly a year earlier. And it had been approved by the Athenian assembly, where six thousand or more men met, debated, and voted on the plan of action, which was passed as a decree. “It was resolved by the Council and the Assembly of the People”: so every decree of the Athenians began. As the assembly took the heavy step of voting for mass departure, the rarest of things may have descended on that rowdiest of parliaments: silence.

  The Athenian people had voted for their own exile. But behind the strategy was one man. Themistocles was the leader whose name was recorded on the official record and the politician who would be blamed if everything failed in the end.

  A document inscribed on stone, known as the Themistocles Decree for the name of the man who moved its passage, confirms Herodotus’s report while adding several important details. Dating from ca. 300 B.C., the inscription may indeed be based on the original document passed by the Athenian assembly. The Themistocles Decree shows that the evacuation of Athens began well before the battle of Artemisium, in August 480 B.C. It also demonstrates how carefully the people of Athens were thinking ahead.

  They made use of Salamis in more ways than one. For example, all the politicians who had been ostracized were recalled in the interests of national unity, but since some of them had been ostracized because of pro-Persian sentiments, they were kept at arm’s length on the island of Salamis.

  Nor was religion neglected. Before the departure of the fleet, for instance, the authorities were to sacrifice to Zeus All-Powerful, to Athena of Victory, and to Poseidon the Securer: that is, to the king of the gods, to the patroness of the city, and to the god of the sea. Power, victory, and security were the themes of the hour.

  The decree’s mobilization of military manpower is even more striking. Not only Athenian citizens but resident aliens were called up. Careful provision was made to combine seasoned rowers with landlubber infantrymen in each of the two hundred ships in the Athenian fleet. The names of each ship’s crew were posted on boards for all to see.

  Each name betokened Themistocles’ political acumen. Xerxes had made his vendetta against Athens into a campaign of conquest, but Themistocles then turned it into a people’s war. This was both his malice and his genius, because evacuation incited the Athenians and left the Persians unfulfilled, which set the stage for a bloody battle.

  Now Athenians turned to the gods, and the god whom the people wanted most to hear from was Apollo. They consulted his prestigious oracle (literally, “mouthpiece”) at Delphi, but its response was not encouraging. Just when the Athenians sounded out the oracle is not known, but it was probably in late 481 or early 480 B.C.

  The Greeks firmly believed that the gods offered signs of the future, if only men know how to read them. The pseudoscience of divination, therefore, was vital to Greek religion. Its branches included the interpretation of dreams, observation of birds, sacrifice, chance omens such as sneezing, and consultation with representatives of the gods at oracular shrines. Of the last, none was more prestigious than Delphi, where the god spoke through a priestess in a trance. Delphi’s prestige rested not only on piety and self-promotion, but also on the solid record of good advice that the oracle had amassed over the years. That, in turn, reflects the thick network of communications that Delphi maintained. The oracle’s advice was based often enough on fact to be worthy of attention.

  Aristonice, priestess of Apollo at Delphi, told the Athenians not even to consider resisting Persia: “O wretches,” she asked, “why are you sitting?” Her advice: “Flee to the ends of the earth, leave your homes and the heights of your city,” because “miserable things are on the way.” Seeing that Apollo’s customers were, to put it mildly, unsatisfied with this response, one of the authorities at Delphi told the Athenians to try again. This time they should approach the priestess as suppliants, holding laurel branches. It was no doubt understood that they would eventually have to repay Apollo’s patience with a more substantial gift.

  This time the priestess held out a little more hope. She said that although everything else in Athens would be captured by the enemy,

  Far-seeing Zeus grants to thrice-born Athena a wooden wall,

  The only place not to be sacked, it will help you and your children.

  Do not wait for the great host coming from the continent,

  Cavalry and foot soldiers; turn your back and withdraw from the foe.

  Eventually you will stand opposite them.

  O divine Salamis, you will destroy the sons of women

  Either at seedtime or at harvesttime.

  Certainly the gods move in mysterious ways, but it is hard not to conclude from so detailed a response that the priests of Apollo had done their homework about the policy options under consideration in Athens. The oracle offered something for everyone, as a heated discussion back in Athens demonstrated.

  Nearly everyone wanted to fight; the question was how. Some Athenians, particularly in the older generation, took “wooden wall” to mean a wooden palisade with which the Acropolis should be defended. But others said that “wooden walls” meant wooden ships, i.e., the Athenian fleet. All effort should focus on readying for battle the new navy begun in 493 B.C. But their opponents raised an objection: Salamis.

  If Apollo had meant to encourage Athenians to fight at sea, he would not have referred to destruction at Salamis; on the contrary, he was warning them to avoid Salamis. So said the fretful, and they were led by the oracle collectors. These men, professional divines who peddled books of predictions, had a significant following in Athens. They were defeatists; rather than resist Xerxes, they wanted Athenians to emigrate as the Phocaeans had. But Themistocles outwitted them.

  Far from discouraging the Athenians, the god was steering them toward “divine Salamis,” said Themistocles. Surely Apollo would have referred to “wretched Salamis” if he had meant to dissuade Athens from the sea. The “sons of women” who would be destroyed must mean the Persians, he said. Note, too, that the oracle predicted a battle there either in spring (harvesttime in Athens) or fall (w
hen the grain is sown in Athens). In war, as in all else, timing is everything; this particular, as will become clear later, is highly significant.

  No politician wins without allies. No ally is more valuable than an ex-enemy, especially a famous enemy. In Cimon son of Miltiades, that is precisely what Themistocles got. Miltiades was the victor of Marathon in 490 B.C. and no friend of Themistocles. After Miltiades’ death from gangrene in 489 B.C. his mantle passed to his young son. In late 481 or early 480 Cimon might have led the charge against Themistocles but instead did just the opposite, and in the most public way possible.

  At the height of the debate over the oracle, Cimon led a public procession. He was an aristocrat and a member of what amounted to one of the most exclusive clubs in Athens, the cavalry. You could always tell a cavalryman in Athens by his long hair and his dandy’s clothes, an odd combination of Spartan toughness and Ionian conspicuous consumption. Tall and curly-haired, Cimon stood at the front of his procession of fellow horsemen. They marched from the edge of the city through the streets toward the Acropolis. There, in Athens’s holiest shrine, the temple of Athena Polias, Cimon dedicated his horse’s bridle to the goddess. Then he took one of the shields hanging on the temple wall, said a prayer to Athena, and marched down to the sea.

  In a grand gesture of political theater, the uncrowned king of Athens’s conservatives gave his public blessing to the radicals. What Cimon said, in effect, was that the national emergency had abolished the difference between aristocratic knights and the lower classes who manned the rowers’ benches. For the duration of the Persian Wars, all Athenians would be seamen. Cimon had proclaimed, in effect, a sacred union. It was a gesture of statesmanship of such daring that it would be tempting to see Themistocles behind it somehow, if not for the knowledge that he was not the only clever patriot in Athens. Cimon deserves credit for sacrificing party for country.