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

by Barry Strauss

  Others said that they could see the shades of the sons of Aeacus with their hands stretched out to protect the Greek triremes. Others insisted that the hero Cychreus (in Greek mythology, the first king of Salamis) appeared to Athenian crews in the form of snake. And it appears that some Aeginetans may have seen something in the sky above the straits—clouds? the morning star? electrical discharges?—that symbolized the god Apollo and the Dioscuri (the sons of Zeus, the heroes Castor and Pollux).

  So the high-pitched religious emotions, the noise and confusion of naval battle, and the Greek habit of competitive bragging all made it difficult to say afterward exactly how the battle had begun. In fact, it was hard to reconstruct the battle altogether. Herodotus, for one, admits that he “can say little precisely about how each of the barbarians or Greeks fought.” Yet he provides invaluable clues, as does that other fifth-century source, Aeschylus, to say nothing of other ancient writers. Nor does Herodotus have the least doubt about why Salamis turned out as it did. More on that presently: first, let us return to the beginning of the battle.

  After the Athenian or Aeginetan trireme rammed the Phoenician trireme, the next ship to join the battle came from the Aegean island of Naxos, captained by one Democritus. Then, all along the straits from St. George to the Cynosura peninsula, ship after ship began to aim at each other.

  But the crucial confrontation of the morning involved the Phoenicians and the Greeks opposite them. To understand how events unfolded, let us return to Aminias. When other Athenian ships came to the aid of Aminias’s vessel, they might have turned and so created an opportunity for Phoenician ramming. But the Phoenicians are unlikely to have picked off more than one or two Athenian ships, because the Athenian line did not break. What happened next may well have come about as follows:

  The Phoenicians tried to row their agile ships around or through the Athenian line, but either flank was protected by a protruding headland. The Athenian triremes held firmly together in mid-line (protected by a second line in the rear to counter any Phoenician breakthrough). The fast-sailing Phoenician ships feinted and darted, but the Athenians would not give them an opening. The Phoenicians charged and retreated, charged and retreated. These superb seamen would do everything that could be done under the circumstances, but they fought under a handicap. The fresh and confident Greeks could afford to make a mistake or two, but the tired and shocked Phoenicians could not.

  In this opening stage of the battle, “at first the flood of the Persian host held firm,” according to Aeschylus. But the Persians were not able to maintain their formation. “The barbarians,” says Herodotus, “did not remain drawn up in order of battle.” The Greeks kept in line.

  Several things went wrong for the Phoenicians. The confined space of the straits made it impossible for them to carry out their signature maneuvers. As an Athenian admiral put it later, a fast and nimble fleet needs space to get the enemy in its sights from some way off, and it needs room to make sharp turns. In the narrows off Salamis, the Phoenicians’ speed offered them no help.

  They were crowded, so if the Phoenicians tried to maneuver in spite of the obstacles, they might run afoul of their own ships, which were closely packed together. In the straits, having more ships turned into a disadvantage. Something similar would happen to the Athenian fleet sixty-seven years later in 413 B.C. during another trireme battle. By then, three generations after Salamis, the Athenian fleet no longer consisted of heavy ships; it had become as light and agile as the Phoenicians were in 480. In 413, Athens ran into trouble in the harbor of the Sicilian Greek city of Syracuse. There, Athens was the invader and Syracuse defended its homeland, just as Athens had done in 480. The Syracusan fleet managed to push the Athenians backward and into confusion in the narrow space of the harbor. To be sure, the Syracusans had a force multiplier, because they had strengthened the bows of their ships enough to allow bow-on ramming.

  The Athenians at Salamis had not strengthened their bows, but they, too, had a force multiplier nonetheless; indeed, they had several. The Persian enemy was exhausted from all-night rowing. He suffered from the aftereffects of shock at the Greek attack. When the morning sea breeze, the aura, began blowing between eight and ten o’clock, his boats might have been pushed to their sides.

  The breeze and the wave “struck the barbarians’ ships and made them totter and delivered them sideways to the Greeks, who set on them sharply,” says Plutarch. In his reconstruction of the battle, the poet Timotheus refers to the “the boat-wrecking breezes (aurai),” which may point to something similar. Since their ships had bulwarks and also a higher center of gravity than the Greeks’ ships, the Persians were especially vulnerable to the breeze.

  For any or all of these reasons, the Phoenicians fell out of order and exposed their sterns to the enemy. The Greeks simply took advantage of it. They charged and charged and did all the damage that could be inflicted by the greatest force multiplier of them all: the heavy weight of their triremes directed against lighter ships.

  Timotheus paints a picture of the shock of impact—perhaps from ramming, perhaps from having the oars sheared off, or perhaps from both. If a smashing blow, he writes, “was inflicted on one side, all the sailors fell backwards together in that direction, but if a [. . .] on the opposite side shattered the many-banked sea-going pines, they were carried back again.”

  Not at first but eventually, within a matter of hours, the Phoenician line fell apart completely. Many of their ships had been rammed. The rest decided that it was better to live and fight again another day than to suffer certain defeat. Some of the survivors, including high-ranking Phoenicians, made it to safety on the nearby Attic shore. They either found refuge on a neighboring ship or they swam.

  The rest of the surviving Phoenician triremes turned and fled to the southeast. If they hugged the Attic shore, they would have seen the struggle on the Persian left continue in the center of the channel. The battle on the Persian left was not decided as quickly as the battle on the Persian right. Herodotus insists that the Ionians and other Greeks on the Persian left did better than the Phoenicians; the Carians were probably on the Persian left as well. Very few Ionians took up Themistocles’ challenge to fight badly in order to help the Greek cause. On the contrary, the Ionians made a stronger showing in the service of Persia than they had at Artemisium, precisely because of Xerxes’ watchful presence at Salamis. Furthermore, we may imagine that some of the Persian ships outside the straits were able to row the short distance to come to the Ionians’ assistance. On top of that, the Persian left did not have to deal with the crack Athenian or Aeginetan squadrons. As a result, the ships on the Greek right could do no better than to hold their own until the Greek left had finished off the Phoenicians and was able to come to their aid.

  From his throne at the foot of Mount Aegaleos, Xerxes had a front-row seat at the humiliation of the Phoenician fleet. Greek poets portray him bewailing his fate, but the lord of Persepolis was not a man to let down the facade in public. More confidence is inspired by Herodotus’s description of Xerxes during the battle: asking for ship identifications from a military aide and then turning every so often to a scribe to have him record the name of a rare captain who had done well—and the name of his father and his country.

  It was not the scene on the water that got Xerxes’ dander up so much as the Phoenician survivors who approached the royal presence on land. The Phoenicians blamed everything on the Ionians. The Ionians had destroyed Phoenician triremes, they claimed, because the Ionians were traitors.

  But the accusers suffered from bad timing. Just as the Phoenicians made their denunciation, a clash of ships unfolded in the straits below. First, a trireme from the Greek island of Samothrace, fighting for Persia, rammed an Athenian trireme. Then an Aeginetan trireme rammed the Samothracian in turn. But the Aeginetan ram must have become stuck in the Samothracian ship, because the Samothracian marines were able to storm onto the Aeginetan ship, javelins in hand, and overpower it.

  The ind
omitable Samothracians were not Ionians, but they were Greeks, and that was good enough for Xerxes. He turned to the Phoenicians, angry beyond measure, and had them hauled away to have their heads cut off. He did not want to let bad men slander their betters, he said, in a lame attempt to justify his rage.

  We do not know about the fate of Tetramnestus, king of Sidon. He probably survived the battle, because he is not named in Herodotus’s or Aeschylus’s lists of prominent casualties. Nor is Xerxes likely to have had a king executed, since monarchs do not like to remind their subjects that royal blood can be spilled. But one thing is certain: Tetramnestus never again enjoyed the status in Xerxes’ eyes that he had on the day before Salamis. There may even be some truth in a later story of Phoenician triremes fleeing all the way back to their home ports in the eastern Mediterranean rather than face the Great King’s wrath.

  Ariabignes would have been lucky to fare similarly. He fought in the thick of battle on what was no doubt a splendid flagship, and every Greek within eyesight must have aimed for it. Ariabignes represented a trophy and a strategic prize.

  Because their generals joined the fray, ancient armies were vulnerable to decapitation. Persian armies were organized in obedience to the Great King and his family and tended to collapse if the commander was killed. The Persian military was hierarchical and not given to individual initiative, while the Greeks excelled at improvisation. The Spartans at Thermopylae, for example, kept fighting after the death of Leonidas. When, 150 years later, King Darius III fled from Alexander the Great at the battle of Issus in Syria in 333 B.C., the Persian line collapsed.

  Knowing the importance of the Great King in battle, a clever enemy general would make him a target. At the battle of Cunaxa in Mesopotamia in 401 B.C., for example, the rebel prince Cyrus the Younger aimed to kill King Artaxerxes but succeeded only in losing his own life; interestingly, Cyrus’s army, made up of Greek mercenaries, continued fighting to victory.

  At Salamis, Xerxes was not available to strike at, but his stand-ins were his half brother Ariabignes and his full brother Achaemenes, admiral of the Egyptian fleet. Ariabignes did in fact die in the battle, as Herodotus confirms, which makes Ariabignes by far the most famous casualty of Salamis.

  Herodotus does not record how or when Ariabignes died. But there are stories in other ancient writers about an unnamed Persian “admiral” or Xerxes’ brother “Ariamenes” (apparently a conflation of Aria bignes and Achae menes) killed early in the battle, after which the Persian fleet fell into disorder. The details in these two accounts do not command trust, but they serve as a reminder that, whenever and however he was killed, Ariabignes’ death probably contributed mightily to the plight of the Persian fleet.

  And there is poetic truth in Plutarch’s assertion that the drifting body of “Ariamenes” was recognized by Artemisia, who then brought it to Xerxes. Rarely have the mighty fallen further.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SALAMIS STRAITS: AFTERNOON

  By midday on September 25, Aminias of Pallene wears his vanity like a victory wreath. Seated on the deck of his trireme, he spits out orders to the pilot, thinking now and then of the choice beasts that he will later sacrifice in gratitude to the gods. Or so we might imagine, because if Athena Nike, the Lady of Victory herself, had stretched out her hand to him that day, he could not have found a better guide to glory. Now he can hold his head above other Greeks; now he is no longer a man without a city, no longer a refugee from spear-won land: he is a man who defends what is sacred and holy and who returns the violet-crowned land of the goddess to the children of Athena, a city made great and strong again.

  His trireme stalks the Salamis straits in search of Persian ships in flight. They are not few in number, since All-Powerful Zeus has instilled fear in the enemy’s hearts. And like Diomedes cutting down Trojans on the windy plain of Troy, Aminias brings black death to the men of western Asia. The difference between the two, of course, is that Aminias cannot in fact wage a private war. Unlike the hero Diomedes, he depends on the cooperation of 199 other men, the crew of his ship. Many of them are Aminias’s demesmen of Pallene, and they share his self-satisfaction; they are all the hardened members of a very small club. At Artemisium and now at Salamis they know the rule: strike or be struck down.

  Aminias represents the many Athenian and Aeginetan captains who turned and attacked the Ionian and Carian squadrons after having routed the Phoenicians. He scored more kills than his comrades, but otherwise his experience was not unusual. The terrible thrusts of the Greek rams—“the utterly ruinous rams,” as Aeschylus calls them—cut apart the Persian fleet. The Sacae archers tried to defend their ships by firing at the enemy as he approached, but shields usually protected the Greek marines, and decks sheltered the rowers. Furthermore, if the aura did indeed upset the Phoenician ships, it might have made it difficult for the archers to take a steady aim. “The arrow,” reports Aeschylus,

  Offered no help, and the whole force was undone,

  Conquered by the shock of the ships’ rams.

  The mighty Iranian arrow, long the favored weapon of shock of Persia’s mounted aristocrats, had been vanquished by the humble instrument of fishermen and ferrymen: “by the single sweep of the oar.” It was a world turned upside down, and the men of Aminias’s ship were in the vanguard of the revolution.

  The defeat of the Ionians and Carians can be told through the experience of captains like Aminias. Trireme battle began with lines of ships in order, but it quickly devolved into a series of single combats. And these combats depended less on any rulebook than on the character of the captain. The ideal captain was cunning, quick, flexible, and ruthless. His success depended less on his knowledge than on his innate ability to size up a situation and to anticipate the enemy’s next move. Today’s experts call this ability situational awareness. The captain must be able to improvise. To quote a modern military maxim, “Nothing is true in tactics.” At Salamis, Aminias lived by that absence of rules—and he lived to be embarrassed by it before the day was done.

  By midday, Aminias’s crew would have been as exhausted as it was exhilarated. In late September, the air temperature in the Salamis straits might have been about 70 degrees Fahrenheit around noon. At this season, the Greek sun is warm and bright without being overwhelming, as it is in summer. But it is nonetheless uncomfortable to sit in, hour after hour, especially with its effects increased by reflection off the water. The marines and archers on deck must have dripped with sweat. Only the captain was protected by a canvas canopy. The men below deck sat in a cramped and poorly ventilated space. Even the thranitai, the top level of rowers, were denied the fresh air that usually blew through the open-sided outrigger. In battle, side covers, made either of canvas or animal hide, were hung over the outrigger to protect the men from arrows.

  As long as a trireme was moving under oar, the men on deck had to remain seated, just like the rowers below. The marines were compelled to learn how to throw a javelin from a seated position in order to be able to attack the enemy’s marines on a ship approaching to ram. Difficult to master, the seated javelin throw also puts strain on the back and arm muscles, which have to do all the work that would normally be shared with the leg muscles. And rarely if at all would a marine have the opportunity to stand up and stretch his legs, let alone take a stroll.

  The rowers would have their own aches and pains to complain of. Modern rowers are able to take full advantage of the strength of their leg muscles via the use of a sliding seat. The ancient oarsman sat on a sheepskin cushion atop a fixed seat. Since his feet were fixed to the floor, a rower would slide slightly back and forth willy-nilly on each stroke. Therefore, he could make some use of the leg muscles, but more of his work was done by the back and arms than is ideal. Confined to a narrow space, ancient oarsmen had not the least bit of privacy. Continually thirsty, they had to make do with a limited supply of water and a few snacks during a hard day’s work. Urination was rarely a problem for rowers, since the body tended to sweat off its w
aste products; a man who had to urinate during battle would have to do so where he sat. (The one woman, Artemisia, no doubt had her own chamber pot.) The thalamians in the hold suffered from the sweat of two upper levels of rowers dripping down on them.

  There would be no chance for chitchat with the man on his side, since an oarsman had to stay silent in order to hear the piper and the rowing master. But the silence might be broken from time to time by the cry of someone who needed the help of the ship’s carpenter. During lulls in the battle, he would be a busy man indeed.

  And in a battle as long as Salamis, which lasted from sunup to sundown, there would be many lulls. Crews would rest; ships would regroup; lines would re-form. After successfully ramming an enemy vessel, for example, a ship’s crew would need time to recover. Since the shoreline was so close, it was possible to ferry the wounded and the dead back to base, possibly on small boats dispatched for that purpose. And once the Greeks had the Persian fleet on the run, there might have been time for triremes to return to shore to make repairs or pick up food or to exchange rowers if any fresh men were available.

  One other ingredient in the men’s psyches should be kept in mind: as the day wore on, almost everyone saw friendly forces die. This was especially true of the Persians, but it also applied to the Greeks, who, for all their success, did incur losses. Pious Greeks believed that the Fates stalked the battlefield, eager to drink human blood. The Fates could not have been disappointed at Salamis. On both sides, ships were rammed, men were slashed by sword, speared by javelin, pierced by arrow, and occasionally smashed by battle-ax or other exotic weapon. The marines were most at risk, because even a ship that escaped the enemy’s ram might lose a man or two on deck to a hostile arrow striking an unshielded body part.

  Some men would survive their wounds, while others would linger for days until infection killed them. But some would die immediately in the straits, especially if they were hit in the abdomen. The death was sometimes painful, desperate, accompanied by gushing blood and by the victim’s screams. Some saw friends or allies die and came away more determined than ever to fight. Others felt fear at what they saw. Still others stopped noticing the slaughter after a while.