Eight years later, in 472 B.C., Aeschylus would again win first prize at the festival, this time for a tragic trilogy that included The Persians, his play about Salamis. He wrote from experience, because he had served at Salamis himself. So says Ion of Chios (ca. 480s—before 421 B.C.), a poet who came to Athens, knew Aeschylus personally, and published memoirs with a well-deserved reputation for accuracy. But after Aeschylus died in 456 B.C., his gravestone mentioned only Marathon and not Salamis. Perhaps the poet had ordered that, in order not to look as if he was trying to outdo his brother Cynegirus.
But what might really have moved Aeschylus was snobbery. The better people in Greece, as the upper classes called themselves, loved Marathon but turned up their noses at Salamis. Marathon was won by good, solid, middle-class farmer-soldiers, but Salamis was a people’s battle, fought by poor men who sat on the rower’s bench. And Aeschylus, who grew ever more conservative with age, might have had ever less use for those people. So, the poet might well have preferred to forget Salamis.
But in 472 B.C. Aeschylus could still see the white horses of the sun rising over the earth that morning and the red stain widening in a Persian grandee’s beard. He remembered things that he described in clichés, but they were earned clichés, as he might have thought; anyone who was there that day had the right to stumble in his words.
He remembered the power in the ship, when everyone was rowing, when you could hear the oars groan from rubbing against the leather oar port sleeves, when you could hear the rushing sound of many oars rowing as one, striking the deep salt sea. He remembered the fishermen, who were everywhere on Salamis, grumbling about the moorings that they had lost to the fleet, then trading theories about strategy in the taverns. Only the fishermen really know the water and the winds and the wrinkles on the surface of the sea at sunrise. They could have spread their nets and picked up dead Persians that day, thick as tuna in the water, split open and boned like mackerel.
But if Aeschylus remembered the look on the Greek sailors’ faces that night, when it was not yet morning, and the captains called them to their stations, and they knew that this was it, the day of death had finally come, and the Athenians among them had to worry about their wives and children here on Salamis—if Aeschylus remembered that, he did not tell. And yet, to anyone who was there, that was the story to remember. The looks of grit or discomfort or relief or fear or ferociousness: no one has recorded those.
It might have been hard for the Greeks on Salamis to sleep the night before the battle, on shore beside the ships, between the sound of Xerxes’ army on the march, echoing across the straits, and the knowledge that the Greek generals were battling with words in Salamis Town. The generals from the Peloponnese were all for rowing westward and fighting for their homes, while they still had them. As for the Athenians, Megarians, and Aeginetans, they might have been ready to fight the other Greeks rather than give up the chance to stay at Salamis and drive the Persians back. The crewmen did not know if the fleet would hang together or split apart. They did not know where they would fight, but they knew it would be soon, that is, unless some renegade turned traitor to the enemy, but maybe that thought was too much to bear.
To relieve the tension, some men might have told jokes. They might have laughed at Themistocles’ itchy fingers, for example, or at the spectacle of the gentry, pale and overweight, trying to pull an oar. They might have traded gripes about rowing masters. They might have argued over who had fought better at Artemisium. They might have wondered when the statues of Aeacus and his sons would ever get to Salamis.
And then it came: first the news that the enemy had snuck past the Greeks and surrounded them in the straits. Then the transcendent call rang forth. The Greeks would fight. It was a call of fear and a call of freedom. It was a battle cry to remind the men of why they had not surrendered to the Persians as most Greeks had: because, as Aeschylus puts it, they “are not called slaves nor subjects of any man.”
And so the Greeks would fight at Salamis. At that hour, suddenly, there were no more Athenians, no more Spartans, no more Corinthians. There were only Greeks. For a brief moment, just before dawn on September 25, 480 B.C., the Greeks achieved a unity that had always eluded them. It was an imperfect unity, because a roughly equal number of Greeks were lined up across the straits, on Persia’s ships, as fought on the Greek side. Yet the men at Salamis represented not just the flower of the city-states but a cross section of their male population. They ranged from the richest to the poorest, from cavalier to knave, from Panhellenic champions to losers at the childhood game of knucklebones, from representatives of families so old that they seemed to have sprung from the soil itself to immigrants from obscure villages somewhere in Thrace or Sicily. As a group they comprised citizens, resident aliens, and slaves. They spanned the ranks of the Greek military, from horsemen to hoplites (infantrymen), from marines to rowers, from archers to scouts. They were going to their ships to fight at last.
It should not have taken them long to get ready. All the Greeks had sharpened their weapons for battle; the debate concerned only where they would fight. The rowers needed just to grab their gear, including a little food and water to bring aboard. But first, they would eat. Since the Athenians had probably brought livestock with them to Salamis, the Greeks might have been able to add cheese to their pre-battle meal. It would all have been washed down with wine, diluted, in the ordinary Greek way, with water. This was the standard way of sending off a warrior with a shot of courage.
But seventy thousand men, the number of men gathered on the eastern shore of Salamis, ready to board their ships, cannot move at once. Thousands more men, Athenian hoplites, many of them presumably teenagers or quinquagenarians, stood ready to line the shore as soon as the ships pulled out. Nor can we be sure that there weren’t other, even older men on the hills and in the town behind them, and women and children, too, peering down into the camp and onto the beaches, trying to grab a glimpse of their men, calling out advice and encouragement, and perhaps even clapping their hands and singing. It was a morning like no other.
From Paloukia Bay southward along the island’s winding coastal curves to Ambelaki Bay, 368 Greek ships stood ready, moored at Salamis’s shoreline, stern first. With the addition of the trireme from Tenos, they represented twenty-three city-states, from Athens, which had 180 triremes at Salamis, to Seriphos, which provided a penteconter. The civilization that we call Greece was made up of a variety of ethnic groups. They all spoke the same language and worshipped the same gods, but they had a variety of laws and customs. The sailors at Salamis represented a virtual cross section of Greek ethnic groups: they included Ionians and Dorians, which were the two main groups, as well as Achaeans, Dryopes, and Macedonians.
The Spartans provided the commanding general, so they were assigned the traditional position of honor at the extreme right of the line, at the southern end of Ambelaki Bay. The Greeks considered the extreme right to be the position of honor, because in an infantry battle, each hoplite held his shield in his left hand, which left his right flank exposed. Every man was able to protect his right by taking advantage of the overlapping shield of the man in line to his right, except for the man on the extreme right. He stood in the most dangerous and therefore the most honorable place.
Tradition also assigned a spot to the city that claimed the next position in importance: the left wing. At Salamis, that honor went to Athens, whose ships were presumably moored in Paloukia Bay. Aegina held the spot to Athens’s right, to judge from the close communication between an Athenian and an Aeginetan commander during the battle.
According to this arrangement, the Spartans stood opposite the Ionians and perhaps other Greeks, while the Athenians and perhaps the Aeginetans faced the Phoenicians. In other words, the best Greek triremes were matched against the best Persian triremes. (It is not known where the other Greek contingents stood in the battle line.)
With full complements, 368 ships would have been filled with about sixty-two thousand
rowers. As they took their seats, the rowers turned to one another and shook hands. These men were the backbone of the battle, and yet we do not know the name of a single one. Only a few captains and commanders are known by name. In fact, the ancient literary sources—histories, dramas, lyric poetry, philosophy—never mention a single rower by name, except for mythical heroes like the Argonauts. Their silence reflects both an age-old tendency in naval warfare to focus on boats instead of individuals and the upper-class bias of ancient literature. But in spite of the literary writers, the names of several hundred rowers in the Athenian fleet around 400 B.C. do survive, preserved in a public document, that is, in a lengthy inscription on stone. There we learn, for instance, of one Demochares of the deme of Thoricus, an Athenian citizen; of Telesippus of Piraeus, a resident alien; of Assyrios the property of Alexippos, a slave; and of Simos, a mercenary from the island of Thasos. These names, of course, mean almost nothing today, but perhaps that is the point. At Salamis, the freedom of Greece depended on ordinary men with undistinguished names. It was indeed democracy’s battle.
On the Athenian triremes if not others, the all-important pilot or helmsman was also a product of democracy. Standing in the stern with a rudder handle in each hand (the trireme had a double rudder), the pilot steered the ship. He made decisions, sometimes split-second decisions, which might provide the margin of victory. Not only did a pilot have to be steady, knowledgeable, and dogged, he also had to be quick, intelligent, and independent. And these were precisely the qualities that Athenian democracy promoted. The society that produced Themistocles would prove to be a fertile recruiting ground for pilots.
Ace pilots might play a critical role at Salamis. The narrowness of the straits would leave little leeway for steering error. Furthermore, the large number of Persian marines and archers would render the Greeks vulnerable to a mauling if their ships were rammed and boarded. It was up to the pilots to avoid Persian rams while landing Greek rams in the enemy.
As they funneled into their ships, some sailors may have faced the possibility of death, while others shunned the thought that they would never step on the earth again. They probably knew that, should they die, even if they won the battle, they might never be buried, and the Greeks had a particular horror of leaving a corpse unburied. They even considered it miserable to have to settle for burial by strangers rather than by one’s loved ones.
When someone dies in the water, his corpse floats for several hours, then loses the air in its lungs and sinks. Unless wind and waves deposit it on the shore sooner, a corpse will not resurface for several days, when bacteria in the abdomen generally emit enough gases to bring it floating up. But a puncture wound in the lung, such as from an arrow, a javelin, or a sword, allows gases to escape and delays the corpse’s ascent. If not found within four days, a corpse’s face will no longer be identifiable. On one occasion Spartan hoplites seem to have brought written identification with them into battle, but we know nothing otherwise of the primitive dog tags that ancient Greek combatants might have carried.
A sailor’s body, therefore, might never be brought home. In later years, when Athens held an annual public funeral for its war dead, there was an empty coffin to symbolize the missing.
No doubt the cause and the camaraderie gave comfort to the men who came on board. But they might also have rallied and found faith in their ships. For the Greeks, triremes were not merely machines, nor even merely “wooden walls”: they were alive and sacred, just as mountains and groves and springs were sacred.
Every warship had a name. Although we do not know the name of a single trireme that fought at Salamis, we do know hundreds of such names surviving from fifth- and fourth-century Athens. Ships were considered female. They were named for goddesses, like Artemis and Aphrodite; for demigods, like Thetis and Amphitrite; for ideals, like Democracy, Freedom, and Equality; for animals, like Lioness, Gazelle, and Sea Horse; for nautical locations, like Cape Sunium and Salamis; for weapons, like Javelin; for soldiers, like Hoplite or Ephebe (young recruit); and even for piratical notions like Rape and Pillage. Outside of Athens (and in some cases, outside Greece), we know of ships named, for example, after a sphinx, a snake, an eagle, a flower, a horse and rider, and for the heroes Castor and Pollux.
Every ship had its name depicted on a painted plaque attached to the prow. The name was possibly written out as well, but the painted image served several important purposes. It was relatively easy to identify in battle, it provided a symbol around which the crew could rally, and, not least, it was comprehensible. The majority of rowers in ancient fleets were almost certainly illiterate or only partially literate. Some of them would have had trouble making out writing, but the picture gave them something to remember.
Each trireme carried other decorations as well. Every stern pole was ornamented with a sculpted object. These represented a region rather than individual ships, and plausibly all the triremes in a given fleet carried the same stern ornament. It appears that Greek ships were all decorated with swan heads. Persian ships seem to have carried a human head in Persian clothing; perhaps this represented a heroic warrior or even the Great King. Stern ornaments were detachable, and were carried off as a victory trophy when a ship was sunk. Phoenician triremes also carried a bow ornament, possibly of a guardian god.
Finally, every trireme, indeed every ship, both in Greece and elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean, had polished, painted-marble plaques on either side of the prow, each depicting an eye. Aeschylus calls triremes “the dark-eyed ships.” The custom of depicting eyes went back to early Egypt. The eyes symbolized the ship’s protective deity. Just as a human lookout sat in the prow and sent messages back to the pilot, so the eyes allowed the ship’s deity to scan the horizon. Aeschylus refers to a ship’s “prow that looks at the way ahead with its eyes obeying . . . the guiding rudder.”
The eyes also marked the prow as sacred space. It was not by accident, for example, that when the Persians captured the trireme from Troezen off the island of Sciathos in August and sacrificed a Troezenian marine named Leon, they chose the ship’s prow as the place to cut his throat.
The prow eyes, the ship’s name (especially if it honored a divinity or hero), and the stern ornament all symbolized the faith and trust of the common sailor in the protection of the gods. Athena might have let her temples on the Athenian Acropolis be destroyed, but she would not let them go unavenged.
Men heading into battle are likely to pray, and the sailors on Salamis would have been no exception. The Greeks always sacrificed an animal before battle. We do not know if, at Salamis, they made one sacrifice on behalf of everyone or if the individual city-states each sacrificed separately. The Spartans always sacrificed a goat to Artemis, so if Eurybiades carried out the rite on behalf of the entire fleet, he certainly would have chosen a goat. The Athenians might well have done likewise. They sometimes selected a different animal to kill before battle, but at Marathon in 490 B.C. they had vowed to sacrifice as many goats to Artemis after the battle as enemies killed. Since they slaughtered six thousand Persians at Marathon, that proved impractical, so instead they sacrificed five hundred goats a year on the sixth day of the month of Boedromion (roughly September). We might imagine, then, that at Salamis they would have been glad to stick to success and sacrifice a goat to Artemis.
In addition, the Greeks would have prayed to the gods for a safe trip. Just before the moment of departure, when every ship was fully loaded with its crew and the ladders had been pulled up, each commander would have carried out the ceremony. He would have recited prayers, followed by the singing of a hymn by his crew, and concluding with the pouring of a cup of wine from each ship’s stern.
It was standard procedure to offer the gods animal sacrifice before battle and a libation of wine before departure. But myths clung to the ceremonies marking so momentous an enterprise as the launching of the Greek fleet at Salamis. It might have been on this occasion, for example, that, at a predawn moment when Themistocles was speaking fro
m the deck of his ship, an owl was supposedly seen to fly through the fleet from the right and land on the halyards of his mast. Everyone who saw it took this as a favorable omen, since the owl was Athena’s bird and had come from the right, that is, the auspicious side.
More lurid is the story of Themistocles’ sacrifice. According to the philosopher Phanias of Lesbos, who was a student of Aristotle, Themistocles sacrificed three human victims beside his trireme. Decked out in gold jewelry, they were high-ranking Persians indeed, no less than the sons of Xerxes’ sister Sandauce and her husband Artaüctus. Apparently an animal sacrifice was in progress when they were brought to Themistocles. At that point, a seer named Euphrantides claimed to witness a conspicuous flame shoot up from the altar and to hear a sneeze from the right. Thrilled, he clasped Themistocles by the hand and told him to sacrifice the three young men to Dionysus Carnivorous if he wanted a victory. Themistocles refused, but the crowd dragged the Persians to the altar and slit their throats. Plutarch, who repeats the story from Phanias, thinks it has merit, but he also tells what seems to be another version, in which Aristides captures the prisoners later, during the battle, before Themistocles allegedly has them sacrificed.
At daybreak, around 6:15 A.M., the outline of the Persian ships across the straits was visible. The Greek generals held an assembly. It was not unusual to launch a fleet before sunrise, but it would have been impractical to hold an assembly of more than three thousand men in the dark. In addition, the Greek commanders had other reasons to delay the launching of the fleet, as will become clear presently.
The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece -- and Western Civilization Page 17