The main advantage of conquering Greece, besides glory, was defensive. Left unchecked, the Greeks might expand. The Aegean islands, Ionia, and Egypt were all waiting to be shaken loose from Persia. And leaving Greece unconquered set a bad example for the other restive peoples of the empire. In short, Greece represented less a resource than a threat.
On top of that, time and treasure added to the war in Greece had to be subtracted from the resources available to police the rest of the empire. On first glance, it might appear that by choosing to withdraw from Athens, Xerxes demonstrated his cowardice. In truth, the Great King showed his maturity. His presence represented a limited resource. Wherever the Great King went, his servants performed better. It would have been irresponsible to stay in Greece when he was needed in so many other parts of his realm.
Already at Phaleron after the battle of Salamis, Xerxes was thinking about his other border trouble spots. Or so we may conclude from a telltale detail: the Egyptian ships in his fleet, once two hundred strong, returned home. But their marines stayed behind, to form part of the Persian land army under Mardonius. It was an interesting choice.
On the one hand, the Egyptians had won the prize for bravery at Artemisium, where they captured five Greek ships, crews and all. With their boarding spears, large battle-axes, long knives, and large daggers, they made picturesque soldiers and perhaps potent ones. There were no Egyptian foot soldiers in the Persian land army, a gap that these marines could fill. On the other hand, the Egyptian squadron had found a place on Mardonius’s list of cowards at Salamis. Perhaps he blamed the captains and not the marines for their spinelessness. Or perhaps the decision to retain the Egyptians was more political than military. The admiral of the Egyptian fleet was Achaemenes, Xerxes’ brother, and governor of Egypt. Perhaps Mardonius chose to flatter Achaemenes in order to improve his standing with Xerxes’ family.
And then there was a negative reason to keep the Egyptians in Greece: they would not be in Egypt. The province on the Nile had revolted from Persian rule only half a dozen years earlier. If Egypt’s ships had survived storms and battles relatively unscathed—as their prowess at Artemisium and absence at Salamis might suggest—then the marines would have numbered two thousand or more. When two thousand armed men had seen the Great King’s failure firsthand, why send them home to a disloyal land? Within a generation, Egypt would rebel again; in 480 B.C., the Persians might have seen it coming.
Of course, Ionian marines also represented potential rebels, but unlike the Egyptians, the Ionians had proven themselves loyal and effective sailors at Salamis. Better to save their marines for another naval battle than to waste them opposite a Spartan hoplite’s spear.
The Egyptian ships are not heard of again in 480 or 479 B.C. Apparently, Xerxes felt he could dispense with them, as well as with those of the Cilicians, Cypriots, Lycians, and Pamphylians. All that remained was the Carians, Ionians, and Phoenicians, the traditional core of the Persian fleet. And that fleet would now be based in the East.
This was part of Xerxes’ new strategy. By pulling his fleet back from Greece, Xerxes changed the power equation. Without that fleet, Persia would find it hard to stop the Greek fleet and maintain control of the Aegean. But it was not impossible. Paradoxical as it seems, the Persian army could defeat the Greek navy. It could do so by conquering Greece and cutting the Greek navy off from its base. But how could the Persian army conquer Greece without a Persian navy to give it the mobility to leapfrog Greek defenses?
Xerxes’ answer, after the disaster at Salamis, was for Persia to return to the old way of dealing with the Greeks: bribery. “Ares,” the god of war, says Timotheus in his poem about Salamis, “is king: Greece does not fear [Persian] gold.” It was a nice boast, but it was not true. The Great King’s riches could still buy Greek traitors. The pro-Persian leaders of Thebes thought so. They told their masters how to conquer all Greece without a battle:
Send money to the men who have the most power in the cities and you will divide Greece. Then, with their help, you will easily defeat those who are not on your side.
This was good advice. The Spartans were seriously worried that Athens would cut a deal with the Persians, and it might have happened. If the Persians had pursued a major charm offensive after Salamis, if they had made a grand gesture offering Athens a substantial concession in recognition of its victory at sea, then the Persians might have been able to make a deal. But the Persians made only a stingy offer, and they followed it with a painful but nonlethal attack.
Athens, the Persians reasoned, could be bought cheaply. Athenians had returned to what was left of their homes a few weeks after Salamis, when the Persian army withdrew northward. In the spring of 479 B.C. the Persians sent the king of Macedon, both a Persian vassal and an old friend of Athens, on an embassy. He reported that Xerxes now offered the Athenians an amnesty for their past crimes against him; he offered them autonomy, the expansion of their territory, and a promise to rebuild their temples at his expense. In return, Xerxes expected to add Athens’s naval power to his side.
When the Athenians turned down the proposition, Mardonius invaded Attica a second time, in June 479 B.C. Once again, the Athenians evacuated their territory for Salamis. Once again, Mardonius sent an ambassador to them, now on Salamis, to repeat Xerxes’ offer. When a member of the Athenian council named Lycides proposed hearing the ambassador out, he was stoned to death by his angry countrymen. Not to be outdone, a crowd of Athenian women made their way to Lycides’ house and stoned to death his wife and children.
To Mardonius, the Athenians were obstinate. An unbiased observer might have said “determined.” The second invasion of Attica only stiffened Athenian resistance. It galvanized them to threaten Sparta that unless it ventured out from Fortress Peloponnese and risked its crack army in defense of Attica, the Athenians would, in fact, make a deal with the Great King. The Spartans agreed: the Persians had provoked the very thing they most wanted to avoid. In short, the Persians proved no shrewder in negotiation than in naval warfare.
Diplomatic ineptitude was Xerxes’ first mistake; his second was trusting Mardonius to lead the remaining Persian forces in Greece. Once negotiations had failed, a more cautious general would have avoided a set battle with Greece’s heavily armed infantrymen. And if battle proved inevitable, he would have insisted on choosing terrain where he could make the most of Persia’s superiority in cavalry. But the bigheaded Mardonius plunged his men into a confrontation on ground where he could not deploy his horsemen. Left to face the iron advance of the Greek phalanx at the battle of Plataea in August 479 B.C., Mardonius lost both his army and his life.
Xerxes’ third mistake was failing to rebuild his fleet in the East. It turned out that Greece’s victory at Salamis was not merely naval but psychological, because it shook the enemy’s confidence in his sea forces. “They had been struck a great blow,” says Herodotus of the Persians: “On sea, they were broken in spirit.”
Whether by accident or design, the Greeks had hit the keystone of Persia’s naval policy at Salamis by devastating the Phoenician fleet. Never a sea power itself, Persia had put its confidence in the Phoenicians. For all the ships in his armada, even after the losses in storms and at Artemisium, Xerxes had little trust in any of them except for the Phoenicians. And it was precisely the Phoenicians who had most disappointed at Salamis.
After the Phoenicians, the two best squadrons in Xerxes’ fleet were the Carians and the Ionians (along with other Greeks). But the Carian contingent was never large and the Ionians were rarely trustworthy. Xerxes’ very first thought after Salamis was that the Ionians would betray the bridges at the Hellespont to the Greek fleet. Besides, precisely because the Ionians had stood so firm at Salamis, they, too, had suffered losses in the straits. The best squadrons in the Persian fleet were bleeding, and the unwounded units were dubious.
Persia had lost a naval battle, but rather than continue the war at sea, Persians found it all too easy to virtually write off their navy. Inde
ed, they seemed almost relieved to be forced back onto their natural element: the land. The war with the Greeks continued at high intensity for another year, but the Persian fleet hugged the coast of Anatolia. They did not expect the Greek fleet to venture across the Aegean to challenge them. When the Greeks did just that in August 479 B.C., the Persians were too afraid of the Greeks to fight them at sea. Instead, they beached their ships on the Anatolian coast at Mycale, opposite the island of Samos, only to lose the land battle that followed. The Greeks burned the Persian ships on the beach at Mycale.
Two other things are striking about the Persian fleet at Mycale. It amounted to only 300 triremes, a far cry from the around 700 triremes at Salamis, not to mention the 1,207 triremes after Persia crossed the Hellespont. Nor did it include the Phoenicians, whose units had been sent elsewhere before the battle. Whether the Persians wanted to use the Phoenician ships elsewhere, say, in Thrace, or whether the Persians wanted to ensure that at least one part of their fleet survived, is unclear. Either motive testifies to Persia’s naval weakness.
But the Great King’s treasury was not empty in 479 B.C., and he would have been wise to use it to build ships. To bribe Ionian admirals. To soothe the egos of unhappy Phoenicians. To buy his captains whatever equipment they said they needed. In the long run, the cheapest way to hold on to Persia’s Aegean empire was to fight for it at sea.
Xerxes had developed a new strategy, after the defeat at Salamis. It was a good strategy, but he and his generals executed it poorly. And so, Persia failed.
On top of everything else, Xerxes underestimated democracy. He understood neither its ferocity nor its ability to learn from its mistakes. The day after Salamis, Xerxes’ nightmare was pursuit to the Hellespont by a Greek fleet. A year later, he no longer considered that likely. Surely, he reasoned, if the Athenians had not sailed to Anatolia in their moment of triumph after Salamis, they would not do so in 479 B.C., after proving unable to defend Attica from a second invasion. The autocrat had no conception of the power of a people in arms who had been provoked.
But his captains did. Twenty-four hours after the end of the slaughter at Salamis, the remaining ships of Xerxes’ fleet left Phaleron Bay for the last time. They had timed their departure for night, in order to keep it secret from the Greeks. They managed to move undetected but not unafraid.
Near Cape Zoster, not far from Phaleron, the lookouts mistook a series of promontories for enemy ships. In their eagerness to flee them, the Persians broke formation. Eventually, they realized their mistake and regrouped.
The Persian ships were impatient to reach the bridges, so they set the fastest course, cutting directly northeastward across the Aegean toward the Hellespont. But at least one squadron followed the longer route along the coast of the Greek mainland, which offered more shelter from the wind. Or so we might guess, judging from the fate of two Carian ships captured by ships from Peparethos (today, Skopelos), a Greek island in the northwestern Aegean, north of Euboea.
Peparethos was not a member of the Hellenic League against Persia. It was a fertile island with a good harbor, and it probably could have managed to build and man a few triremes. Or perhaps it was Peparethian pirates who attacked the Carians; the ships might have been stragglers and therefore easy to pick off. In any case, the people of Peparethos commemorated the feat at Delphi after the war. There, they commissioned a prominent Athenian sculptor to set up a statue to Apollo, the patron god of Delphi. The statue, which was bronze and stood almost twice life-size, is long gone, but the inscription still exists. It reads:
Diopeithes the Athenian made this.
Because the Peparethians captured two ships of the Carians at spearpoint
They gave a tenth of the booty to far-darting Apollo.
Artemisia was not among the victims. Xerxes had given her the honor of bringing his illegitimate children to Ephesus, a port city in Ionia. Hermotimus the eunuch was assigned to join her and serve as the children’s guardian. We can imagine the two masters of cunning aboard the same ship, each trying to extract information from the other without giving up anything in return.
Xerxes had a less pleasant journey. He did not leave with the fleet. Xerxes and the Persian army stayed in Athens for about a week after the battle of Salamis. They left probably on October 2. The Spartans at the Isthmus were, it seems, ready to harass the enemy in his retreat, but they changed their minds because of a bad omen: while King Cleombrotus was sacrificing, there was a partial eclipse.
The Persians marched to Thessaly, about two hundred miles north of Athens. There, Xerxes left Mardonius and his forces for the following year’s campaign. The Great King and a portion of the Persian army continued about three hundred miles to the Hellespont. They kept up a rapid pace. All in all, it took forty-five days to travel the distance of about 550 miles from Athens to the bridges, about half the time of the Persians’ three-month trip to Athens. Xerxes probably reached the Hellespont around December 15.
It was a tough trip. The Persians planned to “live off the land,” to use the ancient euphemism for stealing and extorting food from the locals. But as a result of the Persians’ trip south a few months before, the northern Greeks knew what they were in for, and presumably many of them headed for the hills with their food stores. The Persians were reduced in some places to eating grass, herbs, leaves, and bark. Dysentery struck, and some men were sick and had to be left behind, while others died.
When they reached the Greek city of Abdera in Thrace, Xerxes made a treaty of friendship with the men there. As signs of friendship, he gave them a golden dagger and a tiara with gold detail. Presumably they fed the Persians better than the Persians had been used to. At any rate, the Abderans claimed that Xerxes had been so worried on his trip that Abdera was the first place that he loosened his belt since leaving Athens—but Herodotus discounts this story.
When Xerxes’ men finally made it to the Hellespont shortly afterward, they met up with the Persian fleet that had sailed north from Phaleron Bay at the end of September. The ships ferried the men across the Hellespont, because the bridges had been shaken loose by storms. In the city of Abydos on the Anatolian side of the strait, the men finally found plenty of food, but their troubles were not over. The hungry men gorged themselves, and that and the change in water led to many additional deaths. The rest of the army continued south to Sardis with Xerxes.
Herodotus, who has little regard for Xerxes as a warrior, says nothing about the Great King’s activity in the following year other than the passion he developed for one Artaünte. She was the wife of his brother Masistes, and Xerxes happened to spend time with her in Sardis. He did not consummate the affair until later, when they were both back in Susa. The results were ultimately disastrous, including murder and a rebellion. The moral drawn from all this by Herodotus is that Xerxes was a slave to his lust—and to women.
But although Xerxes may have embarrassed himself in this affair, he is likely to have done serious political and military work in Sardis. In fact, we may imagine him lobbying and pleading and threatening the Ionians to maintain their loyalty to the Great King. And it would be surprising if during the nine months that he spent in Sardis, Xerxes did not consult the strategist who lived only about two hundred miles to the south, the queen of Halicarnassus, who made him think that she fought better than any man in his fleet.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ANDROS
There is a strong smell of salt air on the island of Andros, even in the tent, and a man who steps outside will feel a breeze off the water. The sea is dark at night, but the sound of it lapping against the shore is a reminder of its presence. To Eurybiades son of Eurycleides the sea is an unstable thing and sailors are untrustworthy. Although he is commander in chief of the Greek navy, he has never gotten used to sea people and their habit of defying their betters. And being a Spartan, he considers himself to be better than any foreigner. For two months he has had to put up with the disrespect of Themistocles, and he is doing so again tonight in the G
reeks’ war council. Eurybiades might have wished that he had stayed in Sparta, where he could feel the earth below him and count on the lesser folk to know their place.
So we might imagine the frustrations of the Spartan as his allies continued to argue. It was probably the night of September 27, two days after the battle of Salamis. The Persian fleet had stolen out of Phaleron Bay on the night of September 26. When the Greeks learned that the enemy had given them the slip, they immediately decided to follow. With the Persian navy gone, it was safe to leave just a token force of Greek ships on Salamis.
The Persians had sailed to Athens that summer by following the coast of mainland Greece. That route made strategic sense when they hoped to crush the Greek navy at Artemisium, but it was the long way from Anatolia. Now that they were in a hurry to reach the Hellespont in the fall, the Persians would surely island-hop directly across the Aegean Sea. So the Greeks figured, and they headed straight from Salamis to the enemy’s logical first stop: the island of Andros.
Andros is about eighty nautical miles from Salamis, and even oarsmen tired and short-handed after a battle could have made the trip in a day. But hurry as they did to reach Andros, the Greeks did not see any Persian ships there. If they wanted to catch up to the enemy, they would have to head farther away from home. The Athenians were game, but it was more than most of the Greeks had bargained for, so they held a council to decide on their next step. What to do was by no means obvious, because their fortunes had swung back and forth in the past days.
As the Greek triremes had pulled back to Salamis on the evening of September 25, the cheers and congratulations no doubt gave way to the same rush of postbattle activity as in the Persian camp. Surgeons, soldiers, and slaves hurried to help the living and attend to the dead. The difference, of course, is that at Salamis there would also have been prayers of thanksgiving and maybe even family reunions on the part of Athenian men and their refugee wives and children. And there would have been additional jobs to do.
The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece -- and Western Civilization Page 25