Apparently what happened next is that Polycritus ordered his pilot to bring his trireme between Themistocles and an enemy ship, presumably the one that Themistocles was chasing. The Aeginetan vessel came close enough for Polycritus to be able to shout to Themistocles. He mocked him for criticizing the Aeginetans for Medizing, that is, for being pro-Persian. It seems that this was a common theme of Themistocles, maybe something that he had a habit of throwing in Aegina’s face at councils of war. Now, Polycritus said words to this effect: “Medizers, are we, Themistocles? I’ll show you who’s a Medizer!” And with that, Polycritus rammed an enemy ship. Themistocles’ response, if any, is not recorded.
While he savored that settling of scores, Polycritus could also marvel at the discovery just made when his marines boarded the Sidonian ship they had rammed. They found one of their countrymen, Pytheas son of Ischenöos.
In August, Pytheas had been serving as a marine on an Aeginetan trireme captained by one Asonides when it was captured by the enemy near the northern Greek island of Skiathos. The Persians also captured two other Greek triremes, one from Troezen and one from Athens. The Athenians beached their ship and the men fled; the Troezenian crew was taken and one of its marines had his throat slit as a human sacrifice. Most of the marines on the Aeginetan trireme were captured quickly, but Pytheas resisted. He threw the attackers into disorder.
This was before the battles at Artemisium and marked the first encounter between Greek and Persian vessels. Although the Persians outnumbered the Greeks, ten ships to three, the Greeks might have put up a stiffer fight. Pytheas was the only one to exemplify the spirit of resistance. “He proved to be the bravest man that day,” Herodotus comments. Pytheas kept on fighting until his entire body bore vicious wounds.
When he finally fell he was still breathing. A high percentage of the marines on the enemy ships were Persians, and the Persians greatly admired bravery. So they made an effort to save Pytheas. They dressed his wounds with myrrh, an aromatic resin gathered from desert shrubs on the shore of the Red Sea and used in ancient times for healing because of its anti-bacterial effects; myrrh was also used for burning as incense. The Persians bandaged Pytheas with long strips of fine linen cloth, the same kind used in ancient Egypt to wrap mummies. Then they brought him back to their camp in Therma in northern Greece and exhibited him admiringly to the whole army. The other Aeginetan captives were treated as slaves.
Pytheas should have been dead, but at Salamis, he was held aboard the same Sidonian vessel that had captured him. The Greek cause had come full circle. The first man to resist the Persians at sea was released by his own countryman on the day of Greece’s greatest naval victory.
Pytheas’s is but one of the remarkable stories at the battle of Salamis. Another is that of Phayllos, a trireme captain at Salamis who came from the Greek colony of Croton in southern Italy. Phayllos was already famous in Greece for his three victories in the Pythian Games at Delphi: one in the footrace and two in the pentathlon, a grueling program of discus, javelin, jump, footrace, and wrestling. The Pythian Games were Panhellenic games, like the games at Isthmia and at Nemea (both near Corinth) and the most famous games of all—the Olympic Games. His athlete days were behind him in 480 B.C., when Phayllos was in his fifties, but his name lived on. The graying champion came out of his comfortable retirement to help the Greek cause at Salamis. Phayllos was an aristocrat and very wealthy: he paid for the crew of his own trireme, which was filled with Crotoniates who lived in Greece. This was the only ship from Greek Italy or Sicily to serve at Salamis, and it fought with distinction. Phayllos’s men captured more than one Persian ship in the battle (we do not know the precise number). After the war, Phayllos advertised the victory by putting up a statue of himself on the Athenian Acropolis.
But the most successful Persian-hunter at Salamis was probably the Greek captain Democritus of Naxos, the third man to begin the battle, right after Aminias of Pallene and the Aeginetan ship carrying the statues of the sons of Aeacus. Naxos had sent four triremes to Salamis, but to fight for Persia, not Greece. A large island in the Aegean, Naxos had been sacked by Persia in 490 B.C. and its government had no stomach for revolt. But Democritus did. He was merely a ship’s captain but was one of the best-known men on the island, and he talked the other Naxians into joining the Greeks at Salamis rather than the Persians at Phaleron. (The island of Paros, Naxos’s neighbor—and rival—also stayed away from Phaleron, but Paros did not help the Greeks at Salamis. The Parians liked Athens as little as they did Persia, since Athens had tried to conquer Paros in 489 B.C. So they stayed aloof, waiting to see who won the battle.)
Democritus had a great day at Salamis. The contemporary poet Simonides celebrated him with these words:
Democritus was the third to begin the battle, when at Salamis
The Greeks met with the Medes to fight at sea.
He took five ships which he cleaved asunder and he captured a sixth,
A Dorian vessel that had been dragged off by the barbarian’s hand.
In other words, Democritus took five Persian ships in all, and he recaptured a Greek ship from the Persians. We may imagine that each of these ships had been rammed but not beyond salvaging by the victor.
For a single captain to take no fewer than six ships is a stunning battle record. There are not likely to have been many men like Democritus in either fleet, and yet, afterward, he did not win the prize for prowess. That went to Polycritus of Aegina, followed by two Athenians, Aminias of Pallene and one Eumenes of the deme of Anagyrus, a captain of whom we know nothing. We also hear of another Athenian captain or perhaps cocaptain (the captain’s position was sometimes shared) named Sosicles of the deme of Paeania. We do not know whether these men disabled more Persian triremes than Democritus or whether they owed their fame and honor to the influence of their cities. Regardless, Democritus’s performance at Salamis symbolizes the Greek achievement in that battle.
Corinth had its share of the glory. A Corinthian captain named Diodorus captured an enemy vessel, and there were other successful Corinthian captains whose names are unknown. Corinthian seamen risked their lives at Salamis with their fellow Greeks, and some Corinthians died and were buried in a place of honor outside Salamis Town.
The Corinthian contingent might have begun the battle of Salamis at dawn, by sailing northward, as a decoy to lull the Persians into thinking that the Greeks were in flight and perhaps also as a way of drawing off some Persian ships. To continue this possible reconstruction, as soon as the battle began, a Greek dispatch boat rowed after the Corinthians to call them back. They furled their sails, rowed quickly back, and joined the fray near the Athenians and Aeginetans and contributed to the destruction of the Phoenician fleet.
Or so we might reconstruct the Corinthian battle experience. By the time Herodotus approached the subject in the mid-fifth century B.C., Corinth and Athens had become bitter enemies. Athenians now claimed that Corinth had disgraced itself in battle, while Corinth and the rest of Greece said just the opposite. The other Greeks insisted that Corinth had fought in the first ranks of the battle. In fact, war memorials at Delphi and Olympia had Corinth’s name engraved in third place, after Athens and Sparta. On top of that, no fewer than four epigrams praising Corinth’s role at Salamis survived into the Roman era, which means either that the Athenians slandered a rival or that Corinth worked hard to cover up its failure. That Athens, which controlled Salamis, allowed Corinth to set up one of those epigrams on the island, outside Salamis Town, on the tombstone above the grave of its men who died there, suggests slander.
The Corinthian admiral Adimantus, or so the Athenian story goes, fled in terror at the moment when the two fleets first came to blows. He spread his sails and headed north, followed by his whole squadron of forty ships. But a speedy dispatch boat, “sent by divine intervention,” caught the Corinthians off the coast of Salamis. A messenger denounced Adimantus as a traitor and told him that the Greeks were winning. Adimantus and his men returned, but in
time only for the end of the battle.
Since the battle lasted for about twelve hours and Salamis is a small island, it can hardly be true that Corinth missed most of the battle. The epigrams tell a tale of Corinth’s valor. The gravestone epigram on Salamis reads:
Stranger, once we lived in the well-watered town of Corinth
But now Salamis, the island of Ajax, holds us
Here we took Phoenician ships and Persians
And Medes: And so we protected sacred Greece.
A Corinthian commemorative plaque was set up in Corinthian territory at the Isthmus, in the sanctuary of Poseidon, where the biennial Isthmian Games were held. The epigram is eloquent:
When all Greece was balanced on the razor’s edge
We protected her with our souls and here we lie.
This cenotaph (a memorial over an empty tomb) stood in the general area to which the Corinthian admiral Adimantus had wanted to move the Greek fleet from Salamis. He did not get his wish, but at least he got it memorialized. We may imagine that the cenotaph stood nearby the Persian ship captured at Salamis that, according to Herodotus, was still preserved at the Isthmus in his day, around 430 B.C.
The Corinthian Adimantus had a proud epitaph at Corinth that read:
This grave is Adimantus’, through whom
All Greece put on a victory wreath of freedom.
Perhaps also as part of Adimantus’s publicity campaign, he named his daughters “Victory with Ships” (Nausinice), “Pick of the Booty” (Acrothinium), and “Defense Against Force” (Alexibia); his son was named “The Bravest” (Aristeus).
There is also a dedication, in a temple of the goddess Leto, by the Corinthian captain Diodorus, which states:
The rowers of Diodorus took these weapons from the hostile Medes
And dedicated them to Leto as a memorial of the naval battle.
Traditionally, warriors dedicated an enemy’s shields, but perhaps Diodorus’s ship left stern ornaments.
Finally, there is a story that the women of Corinth prayed to Aphrodite that their men “throw themselves heart and soul into the fight against the barbarians.” This was an inspired prayer, because the Greek word for “throw themselves into” also means “to ram.” (Ancient comics made hay out of the sexual double meaning of “to ram.”) On top of that, Aphrodite was worshipped at Corinth by sacred prostitutes, and some ancient writers say that it wasn’t all the women of Corinth but just the prostitutes who made this prayer. Eventually, bronze statues of women were set up in the temple of Aphrodite on the Acropolis of Corinth with this inscription:
These statues of women have been set up because they prayed to the Cypriot
Goddess on behalf of the Greeks and their citizens who fight fairly and openly.
Bright Aphrodite had no intention of surrendering
Her Acropolis to the arrow-bearing Medes.
This remarkable inscription manages to celebrate Corinth while taking a swipe at Athens and Athenian manhood. The reference to Aphrodite’s Acropolis might remind a visitor of Athena’s Acropolis and its capture by the Persians. The reference to fighting “fairly and openly” might contrast favorably with Themistocles’ cunning that bordered on treachery. Finally, the Greek word for “fight fairly and openly” can also mean “fight with an erection”—an appropriate prayer to Aphrodite, after all. The Greeks were not prudes, and what they said was, in effect, that the Corinthians were big men in every sense, and so they stuck it to the Persians.
At midday during the battle of Salamis, a Persian sentry atop Munychia in Piraeus would have looked out over a sea whose colors ranged from turquoise to blue to silver to gray. Looking southeast, he would have seen Phaleron Bay, where the Persian fleet had left its harbor the night before. Beyond, the hills rolled clear toward the southern horizon, all the way to Cape Sunium.
Turning behind, looking northeast, the Persian would have had a clear view of the ruins of the Athenian Acropolis. Mount Hymettus, famed for its honey, rose like a curtain wall behind it to the south. Mount Pentele, rich in marble, loomed to the northeast, while the pine-forested Mount Parnes closed the Attic plain to the north. Turning now to the southwest, the Persian would have faced the low, rugged hills of the island of Salamis in the distant haze, with the conical peak of Mount Oros on the island of Aegina behind it. Looking back to the east, following the turn of the Attic coast, he would have seen the entrance to the bay of Salamis.
As he surveyed the scene, the Persian lookout would have seen victory behind him and uncertainty ahead. As the day wore on, if he kept looking, he would have watched as Persia’s ships fled back to Phaleron, chased by their victorious enemies. It was a spectacle of horror on an early autumn afternoon when the sea was all silvery blue in the shimmering light. Everything was blue and gray and silver—and blood red.
There was no place of honor for the Persian dead, and they vastly outnumbered the Corinthians; indeed they outnumbered all the Greeks. We do not know how many Persian crewmen died at Salamis. Herodotus does not try to give numbers. He simply says that many well-known Persians, Medes, and their allies died besides Ariabignes. Greek losses were few. Unless they died in “the law of hands,” the Greeks tended to swim to safety, unlike the enemy, at least the Iranian and Sacae marines and officers. The Ionians and other Greeks in the Persian fleet, as well as maritime peoples such as the Phoenicians and Carians, would surely have mastered the skill of swimming.
Aeschylus, too, speaks of some Persians dying in hand-to-hand combat and others surviving that struggle, only to drown. He names nineteen Persian “chiefs” who died at Salamis; most of them are mere names, perhaps chosen by the poet for their colorful sound, but one is the king or syennesis (a formal title) of Cilicia. He was an important man from a wealthy region in southern Anatolia. Herodotus does not mention his death, but if Aeschylus is right, it was a significant blow for Xerxes. And likewise the range of countries from which Aeschylus’s casualties come, if it is credible: besides Persia, there is Bactria, Cilicia, Egypt, Lydia, Mysia, and Phoenicia.
An author of the Roman era, perhaps citing a fourth century B.C. Greek source, writes that the Greeks lost more than forty triremes at Salamis, while the Persians lost over two hundred; that is, a ratio of 1:5. This suits the lopsided outcome of the battle. It also fits the fact that Xerxes continued to have a large number of triremes even after Salamis. So these figures may be roughly correct.
Using them only as a guideline, it appears that the Persians lost more than six thousand marines as well as a small number of elite officers. If, at a guess, an equal number of oarsmen in the Persian fleet were killed during the “law of hands,” then the total number of Persian deaths at Salamis would be over twelve thousand. Remembering the fate of Damasithymus’s men, all of whom were massacred, this figure should perhaps be considered a minimum. It would not be surprising if the Persians lost twenty thousand men or more.
Aeschylus’s Persian messenger sums up the disaster of Salamis thus:
Be sure of this: never in a single day
Has so great a number of people died.
And even after every Persian ship was rammed or had escaped, there were still survivors, clinging onto debris, who could be picked up if they were Greek, or killed or left to die if they were Persian. Their wailing, says Aeschylus, could still be heard at sundown, which occurred in Athens at 7:18 P.M. on September 25.
By then, the wind and waves would probably have begun the ghoulish delivery of corpses onto the shore, a process that continued for several days. These corpses were mainly from Persian ships, since they formed the overwhelming majority of the casualties. Aeschylus states that
The shores of Salamis and every nearby place
Are full of corpses, rotting ill-starredly.
And:
The sea-dyed, much-driven bodies
Are carried, after death . . .
In wanderings in both directions.
And:
Lost from a ship of Tyre near the headlands
>
Of Salamis, they lie on the rugged headlands.
“And the starry sea swarmed with their [Persian] bodies,” says Timotheus, “and the shores were laden.” While some corpses ended up on Salamis, most of them seem to have been blown toward Attica. At the end of the day, a zephyr, a west wind, blew up, and eventually it drove wrecks, oars, and corpses onto the Attic shore around Cape Colias, not far south of Phaleron.
After the battle, Mardonius, Xerxes’ chief adviser, threw the accusation of cowardice in the face of the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Cypriots, and the Cilicians. He may have been right if by cowardice he meant that after a certain point they chose to flee rather than fight. By no means did these squadrons go without casualties, but each probably preferred to cut its losses.
The Persian navy was ill-suited to battle an opponent who could neither be intimidated nor bought off—an opponent like the Greeks. The Persian fleet was less a naval than a political organization. It was not a single structure but, rather, a group of chieftains each vying for the favor of the overlord. It was less a navy than a floating royal court.
And so, by turns too confident and too cowardly, the Persian fleet at Salamis fought well but never wisely. Had it been willing to fight on, the Persians could have inflicted more losses on the Greeks, thereby increasing the odds of ultimate victory should Xerxes be willing to continue the fight at sea another day. On the other hand, had they retreated without each unit trying its luck, the Persians would have saved their strength for later. In the end, they did neither.
The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece -- and Western Civilization Page 23