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

by Barry Strauss

  Themistocles won the debate over strategy. Herodotus reports that the Athenians voted to await the barbarian invasion of Greece with their entire supply of manpower deployed on ships. As agreed by the Hellenic League at its meeting at the Isthmus, the other Greek allies would defend the country by land. They would try to stop the Persians in the north, but if that failed, the Athenians resolved to evacuate Attica and fight at Salamis. The pious were mollified by a resolution to leave the city in the care of its patron god, Athena.

  Nothing so became the land of the Athenians as the manner of their leaving it. In light of the common criticism of democracy as soft and submissive, it is worth appraising the price that democratic Athens was willing to pay for freedom. The Athenian assembly voted not only to send its young men out to battle but to uproot its elderly, its women, and its children. And the march of the population of Athens aboard refugee ships—the population of a city so ancient that its name is older than the Greek language itself—the willing steps of a people who did not know if they would go home again, might have been as stunning a sight as the seven days’ procession of Xerxes’ army across the bridges of the Hellespont.

  Later generations would revere the decision for exile and inscribe and reinscribe it in stone. They celebrated its daring, and they were right. While most Greeks surrendered, while their Peloponnesian allies tried to abandon them, the Athenians thought it a high honor to resist Persia. Rather than flee Greece, says Herodotus, “they stayed behind and waited courageously for the enemy to invade their land.” The day they passed a motion to evacuate Athens, the Athenians decided that not only their soldiers and rowers stood on the watchtowers of history, they all did.

  On a likely reconstruction, the Athenians decided to carry out the evacuation in two stages. The date of the decree may be as late as June 480 B.C. Athenian women, children, and old men probably left first, while the young men stayed behind to man the fleet.

  The final evacuation began only when the men returned from Artemisium, about September 1. The Athenian fleet put in at its harbor at Phaleron about three days after leaving Artemisium, a distance of about 214 nautical miles. The Persian fleet had remained in northern Euboea for six days after the battle, in order to repair ships, receive reinforcements from the Greek islands, and see the battlefield at Thermopylae. That meant that the Athenians had less than a week to carry out the bulk of their mass departure. To be sure, neither the Persian navy nor the Persian army’s advance guard, which reached Attica about September 5, could scour all Attica, which meant there was still time to escape until the full Persian forces arrived around September 20. But the first sight of Persians in Attica no doubt lit a fire under Athenian stragglers.

  The evacuation turned out to be more spontaneous and slapdash than the Athenian assembly had planned. But Law and Order were Spartan goddesses; the Athenians worshipped Freedom. Athenians were famously individualistic and suspicious of authority, and no doubt many had ignored the earlier mandate to leave. Others may have first left but then, when the Persians failed to appear, returned to Athens. So the exodus of September 480 B.C. included women and children, people who, in principle, should have already left for Troezen. Some now went to Troezen, some to Aegina, and the rest to Salamis.

  Yet even with the news from Artemisium and Thermopylae, it was still not easy to convince the Athenians to leave home. Help came from Athens’s council of former chief magistrates, the Areopagus, named for the hill near the Acropolis on which it met. The Areopagus voted every sailor a maintenance allowance of eight drachmas, about enough money to buy food for three weeks. The money probably came from the state treasury. Classical Greek navies carried only the most minimal supplies. Sailors were expected to buy food at local markets, which made an allowance essential for most men.

  Themistocles was a member of the Areopagus, but an alternate story denies his ability to convince that council to assign state funds to the fleet. Instead, the money depended on a scheme of his. In the confusion of departure, someone stole the gold Gorgon head of the statue of Athena on the Acropolis. On the excuse of looking for this priceless relic, Themistocles managed to get people’s luggage ransacked. He confiscated all the money he found and used it to pay the men. We do not know which story is the truth, nor do we know if the Gorgon head was ever found.

  It may be that the city of Troezen encouraged the evacuation as well. At least in later years, Troezenians claimed that they passed a law to support Athenian refugees at public expense. Each Athenian family relocated to Troezen was voted a modest daily subsidy; their children were allowed to pick fruit from any trees they wanted; and teachers were hired for them as well.

  An added fillip for departure came from the Acropolis. The ancients believed that when a city faced destruction, its patron deity left first. The patron of Athens was the goddess Athena, who revealed herself in many ways, one of which was supposedly as a great snake that lived in a temple on the Acropolis. No one had ever seen the snake except, allegedly, the temple staff, who claimed to have proof of its existence. Once a month the priestess of Athena the Guardian of the City left out a honey cake and, somehow or other, it disappeared. The snake, it was thought, must have eaten it. This month, however, the impossible happened: the honey cake was left untouched. The priestess drew the conclusion that Athena had abandoned the city. She concluded that the Persians would destroy Athens, and she informed the Athenian people.

  Behind the priestess, it was whispered, stood the serpent of the speaker’s platform, Themistocles. The story of the snake and the honey cake, they said, was just a comedy of his devising. Themistocles allegedly convinced the priestess to concoct the tale of the rejected honey cake in order to manipulate public opinion. If Themistocles did indeed negotiate with the priestess, she was probably no pushover. A mature woman from a prominent family, she managed the most important cult in the city. She served for life and lived on the Acropolis. She was surely as savvy politically as she was pious.

  One way or another, the priestess informed the city of Athena’s flight, but not every last Athenian followed. In the countryside, where most Athenians lived, what looked like safe hiding places tempted those who could not bear to leave. The Persians caught them and sent five hundred Athenian prisoners across the Aegean Sea to the island of Samos. How many Athenians they murdered in Attica is not recorded.

  It was the supreme emergency in the history of the nation. Democracy in Athens lasted 250 years, and most of that time Athens was a naval power, yet this was one of only two occasions when every single available man was drafted for service aboard ship; the other occasion came later at the low point of the Peloponnesian War. Little in the long history of government by the people tested democracy like this moment.

  If it worked, the evacuation of Athens would be celebrated as one of the supreme strategic retreats in the history of war. If it failed, it would be lamented in exile.

  Few of Athens’s blue bloods wished to risk capture by Xerxes. Among their ranks in the evacuees was a teenager named Pericles, son of the aristocrat Xanthippus son of Ariphron of the deme of Cholargos. One day Pericles would be the first man in Athens. In 480 B.C., however, for the second time in his fourteen years, Pericles and his family, including his brother and sister, were going into exile. In 484 B.C., Xanthippus had been ostracized and the family left Athens, possibly for the northern Peloponnesian city of Sicyon, where they had relatives. That had been a private drama, but in 480, all Athens shared Pericles’ experience of upheaval.

  Anecdotes of the departure abounded. One story, for example, said that Xanthippus’s dog was so devoted that he swam after his master’s trireme across the mile-wide straits of Salamis, reached the other shore, and immediately died of exhaustion. A spot in Salamis known centuries later as the Dog’s Tomb was said to mark his grave.

  The departure of a Greek warrior was ordinarily marked by a ceremony. Typically, the woman of the house would use a small pitcher to pour a libation, an offering of wine to the gods, in t
he hope of a safe return. But who made the libation when the whole family departed, as most Athenian families did in September 480 B.C.? Whoever presided, perhaps the words echoed these sentiments of the Greek poet Theognis of Megara:

  May Zeus who dwells in the sky ever hold his right hand over this city

  to keep off harm, and may the other blessed immortals do likewise, and

  may Apollo make straight our tongue and mind.

  . . . after offering libations satisfying to

  the gods let us drink, . . .

  fearing not the Median war.

  The Athenian refugees carried what little they could into exile. The rest they left behind, everything from clay tableware, lamps, and loom weights to glass bowls, coins, and jewelry buried in the backyard, and bronze objects of every kind—pots, bowls, ladles, tripods, weights decorated with dolphins. The wealthiest left family graves marked by statues, including images of horsemen and athletes, immigrants and infantrymen, lions and boars, sphinxes, wreaths, and flowers. They left behind records of past mourning, like the epitaph for one Anaxilas of Naxos, who died around 510 B.C., leaving behind a family “fraught with grief, sorrow, and lamentation.” They left behind tombs containing gold rings, earrings, and necklaces; iron swords and spearheads; ceramic toys; knucklebones; and painted pottery of every shape and size, decorated variously with scenes of gods and heroes, lovers and conquerors, roosters and sphinxes, athletes and warriors, weavers, satyrs, and dolphins.

  As the Persians made their progress through a largely empty Attica, they looted whatever they could and demolished whatever seemed worth the trouble of destruction. The vengeance that had been denied at Marathon was finally at hand.

  What did the Persians think of the Athenians as they smashed their vases? Did they stop to look at the painted scenes? Did they notice that the images of drinking, playing, and praying were far outnumbered by those of fighting? Did they consider the meaning of all those pictures of warriors spearing, stabbing, and pummeling each other to death and then fighting over the corpses—having of course first stripped the enemy dead of their arms?

  What did the Persians think of the Athenians as they overturned their statues? Did they notice, for instance, a bronze statue of Apollo holding a bow? This tall, strong, lean, and powerful figure is more street fighter than god of light. What did they make of Artemis with her quiver or Athena in her bronze helmet and breastplate of goatskin and snakes?

  Did it occur to the Persians that they had taken on a nation of killers? Or did they simply dismiss the Greeks as braggart savages? No doubt the latter, since soldiers rarely imagine their own death. Whatever they found in deserted Attica, the Persians probably preferred focusing on the kind of scene illustrated by an Iranian cylinder seal of the period. This object, made of the semiprecious stone chalcedony, would be rolled across a wet clay stamp on a document to yield an image of Persia triumphant. It showed the Great King spearing a fallen Greek foot soldier.

  When the Persians reached the city of Athens they found it empty. Athenians were not in evidence except on the Acropolis. The men there were not many in number, but they were diverse. A group amounting to, at a guess, several hundred consisted of treasurers of the temple of Athena, who were all wealthy men; men too poor or too physically infirm to support themselves on Salamis; and, finally, those who simply refused to believe that the “wooden wall” meant ships and not a wooden palisade on the Acropolis itself. They put up a better fight than might have been expected.

  The Athenian Acropolis is a natural fortress, its slopes sheer and precipitous. Oblong in shape, it stands about 512 feet high and covers a space of about 1,000 by 500 feet—about three times as long and three times as wide as an American football field. The defenders barricaded the Acropolis with doors and wooden beams, which they presumably took from the temples. In all likelihood, they built the barricade on the stone gateway to the Acropolis.

  The Persians, meanwhile, based themselves on the nearby Areopagus, or Hill of Ares, a rocky summit that rises to a height of about 375 feet across a narrow valley from the west end of the Acropolis. From there, Persian archers shot flaming arrows up into the wooden enclosure that the Athenians had built. Tied to each arrow was a strip of hemp or some other plant fiber that had been dipped in flammable liquid, such as pine resin, and which was ignited as it was shot.

  Beforehand, the Persians had called on Athenian exiles that they had in tow and sent them over to the Acropolis to talk sense to the defenders. The exiles were heirs of the former tyrant Hippias, last seen in Athens in 490 B.C. at the battle of Marathon. The wardens of the Acropolis were unimpressed. They responded to the exiles’ offer by rolling stones down on the Persians who attempted to climb the Acropolis.

  For what Herodotus calls “a long time”—perhaps several days—the Persians were stymied. Then they found a way up via a trail in the cleft of the rock on the northwestern part of the Acropolis, a way so steep that it had been left unguarded. When the defenders saw the Persians reach the top, some of them committed suicide by leaping off the hill. The others took refuge in the temple of the goddess. Murder in a sanctuary was a great crime under Greek law. And yet, says Herodotus, as soon as the Persians reached the top of the Acropolis, they made straight for the temple and “they opened the gates and murdered the suppliants.” There were no survivors.

  Athens’s unknown warriors could not have looked less gallant: men too poor to own armor or too duty-bound to join the fleet at Salamis or too frail to move without a walking stick. Yet like the Spartan soldiers at Thermopylae, these Athenians defended Greek soil to the death. So far as is known, no monument was ever erected to them, but as Pericles said not long afterward, brave men have the whole earth as their sepulcher.

  After slaughtering the Athenians, the Persians looted the treasures of the temples and then set fire to the whole hill. The wooden beams of its stone buildings blazed, leaving fire-stained wrecks.

  The Persians had destroyed the Acropolis but not the Acropolis known to us. The Athenian Acropolis whose ruins are famous today is largely the product of the generation after the Persian Wars. The Acropolis’s best-known building, the Temple of Athena Parthenos, the Virgin Goddess Athena—the Parthenon—was completed in 432 B.C.

  The Athenian Acropolis of 480 B.C. was not the icon of Western art that it would later become. Its art and architecture were exuberant, experimental, even grotesque—anything but serene. The old temples of the Acropolis were full of statues of lions and sea monsters, of Gorgons and gaily painted snakes, of men with trim black beards, of long-tressed women in long pleated gowns, of youths with hair teased into snail-shell-style curls.

  The bric-a-brac of the cluttered space of the old Acropolis reflected centuries of accretion rather than a single classical program. For the Athenians to rebuild the Acropolis, as they did, beginning in the 440s B.C., they had first to clear away the old buildings and statues. The fires set by Xerxes’ men in 480 B.C. proved, therefore, to be an act of creative destruction, although it did not seem that way to the Greeks at the time.

  On the contrary, it might have seemed like the end of the world. The Persians had destroyed the sum total of a people’s religious faith. Everything that the Athenians had accumulated over the centuries, patiently and piously, had been ruined in an afternoon. To the ancient Greeks, what the Persians did amounted to a crime against the gods. Fighting the barbarians afterward was no longer an act merely of self-defense; it was an act of piety.

  Xerxes now controlled Athens. He sent a horseman hurrying back to Susa to bring the good news to Artabanus, who was the Great King’s uncle, his regent, and the arch-dove of the preexpedition debates. Xerxes had reason to welcome the congratulations that his men now surely showered upon him. Hermotimus was no doubt among them.

  Back in Persia, in the Palace of Darius at Persepolis, carved into a doorjamb, stands a sculpture in relief of a beardless attendant. Well-dressed, carefully groomed, and good-looking, he is usually thought to be a eunuch. I
n his right hand, he carries a perfume bottle, a round-bottomed, tubular flask closed with a stopper. He holds a towel draped over his left hand. He strides ahead, as if to bring the objects to the Great King.

  So we might imagine Hermotimus, after the fall of the Acropolis, waiting on Xerxes. As a high-ranking eunuch, Hermotimus would have brought the ruler honeyed words instead of cosmetics and cloths, but the principle was the same: devotion. Hermotimus would not have wanted to miss an opportunity to flatter the Great King.

  But the eunuch, a connoisseur of vengeance, would probably have turned a skeptical eye on the flames over Athens. The Greek fleet still sat in the Salamis channel, within sight of the Persian victors on the Acropolis. Hermotimus would want nothing less than to see the enemy’s ships smashed.

  The Greeks had not surrendered. Athens was occupied, Athens was burning, but the Athenians were unbowed. The sack of the Acropolis no doubt struck terror in some Athenian hearts, but for the most part it seems only to have increased their appetite for battle.

  In fact, the Greeks’ greatest enemy at this point was not Persia but themselves. The arguments swung this way and that during the course of violent disagreements at Greek naval headquarters. The Greeks had abandoned Athens, but their navy now lay barely a mile away. The fleet had docked at Salamis, in the harbor across the channel from the mainland that now lay in enemy hands. On that fleet now depended the future of Greece.