Attica itself was probably largely intact. The Persians had not been there long enough to inflict deep devastation on the land’s infrastructure. But they had gone after prestige targets. Besides destroying temples and overturning statues, they had carried off works of art with them back to Anatolia. The most famous losses were a bronze statue of the goddess Artemis, taken from her rural shrine at Brauron, and a set of statues of the heroes Harmodius and Aristogeiton. The images of these two men, honored as tyrant slayers, were taken from the Athenian Acropolis to Xerxes’ palace at Persepolis, in southwestern Iran. When Alexander the Great arrived there as a conqueror in 330 B.C., he arranged for the statues to be brought back to Greece. The originals have disappeared, but Roman-era copies of excellent quality still survive.
On Salamis, the commanders had the breathing space to take care of an important post-battle ritual: distributing booty. It was standard procedure for the victors to comb the field—or the ships and the shore—for anything worth taking. Afterward, it was up to the commanders to parcel out the loot. It was to be expected that each commander would keep something for himself. And valor on the battlefield would also be rewarded.
After the battle, all the talk was of the bravery of Aegina, followed by that of Athens. Plunder was distributed accordingly. The gods were rewarded before cities or individuals. The Greek way was to dedicate one tenth of the booty, the so-called first fruits, to the gods. The Salamis tithe consisted of various objects, including three Phoenician triremes, one at Salamis, as an offering to Ajax, and the other two as offerings to Poseidon, one at Cape Sunium in Attica and the other at the Panhellenic shrine at the Isthmus. This was the ship that Herodotus reported seeing fifty years after the battle.
The shrine of Apollo at Delphi was the holiest site in Greece and it, too, had to receive a thank-offering. The fleet at Salamis sent enough booty to Delphi to erect an almost eighteen-foot-high bronze statue of Apollo holding the stern ornament of a ship in his hand. But the priests of Delphi let it be known that the god Apollo felt shortchanged by Aegina, the biggest single beneficiary of the plunder of Salamis. The Aeginetans made amends by building a monument at Delphi consisting of three gold stars on a bronze mast, which Herodotus also saw.
After dividing the booty, the Greek allies left Salamis. They were finally going to the Isthmus. After they launched their ships and began the trip, as the island disappeared in the distance, it might have occurred to someone aboard one of the departing triremes just how much the world had changed since the night of September 24–25, when the Greek move to the Isthmus had been interrupted by the news that the enemy had surrounded them at Salamis.
Isthmia was a religious shrine, sacred to Poseidon, lord of the sea. It was also territory that belonged to Corinth. Isthmia lay just beyond the makeshift wall thrown up a month earlier to stop the Persians. Here, the ongoing threat to Greece would have often intruded into men’s minds. It was not the place for calm reflection, but it was where the alliance had chosen to make an important decision.
The commanders were to choose which one of them should be awarded a prize for bravery at Salamis. Each man’s career, and the honor that every Greek craved, depended on the result. To win the vote would be splendid; to support a loser would be fatal. In what might have been an effort to substitute solemnity for favoritism, the commanders followed a ritual voting procedure: one by one, they were to walk up to the altar of Poseidon and each deposit his ballot.
But unfortunately, nobody rose to the occasion. Each general without exception voted for himself. But he was also asked to award second place. On this matter, a majority—though not all—voted for Themistocles. But jealousy prevented the awarding of any prize. The navy was disbanded and the commanders each sailed home, but not without a murmur making the rounds, as Herodotus reports:
Themistocles’ name was the cry of the hour, and it was agreed that he was the smartest man in all of Greece.
But an ambitious man like Themistocles wanted more than a murmur of support; he wanted formal recognition. He had not received it from his comrades at Salamis nor was he likely to get it from his fellow citizens in Athens. Democracy distrusts great men, and Themistocles was not ashamed about reminding Athenians of his greatness. We can detect the signs of a postwar debate in Athens as to whether Salamis was a victory of the Athenian people or of their most famous strategist. Besides, it is human nature to hate those who see our secret weakness, and Themistocles had seen his countrymen at their most vulnerable.
A revealing anecdote is told about a certain Athenian named Timodemus of the deme of Aphidna. He was an insignificant person whose jealousy of Themistocles verged on insanity but brought him into the public eye. Timodemus constantly told Themistocles that he would have been nothing had he not been an Athenian. Finally, Themistocles swatted his enemy down with a witticism: “If I came from [the tiny islet of] Belbina,” Themistocles said, “I’d be nothing, but even though you are an Athenian, Timodemus, you are still nothing.” Timodemus may have been a buffoon, but behind him, one suspects, there stood thousands of Athenians who each felt that in his private sacrifice—from fighting on a ship in the straits to living off the handouts of strangers in exile—he or she had made a difference. And none of them wished to bow down before a statue of Themistocles, however much he might have deserved their curtsy.
Disrespected in his own city-state, Themistocles had to go to Sparta to achieve recognition. If this seems strange, remember that the more Sparta glorified Themistocles, the less it had to honor its own hero, Eurybiades. Spartans liked the cult of personality no more than Athenians did. So they chose the perfect gesture to force Themistocles and Eurybiades to share their glory: they gave them each an olive wreath, Eurybiades for bravery and Themistocles for wisdom and dexterity. It was as much as saying that neither man could quite have won the victory alone.
The Spartans also gave Themistocles a chariot, the most beautiful available in Sparta. It was probably a fairly plain affair, given how much Spartans disliked luxury. But no one could deny the praise that was heaped on Themistocles in Sparta. The most striking thing of all was the escort that he received: three hundred picked men accompanied Themistocles to the border when he left. Herodotus knew of no other man in history to have received this honor from Sparta. And the number three hundred, of course, recalled the number of men who died with Leonidas at Thermopylae. To be sure, this tended to downplay the battle of Salamis, but let us give the man his due: the gesture also meant that the greatest military power in the history of the Greeks associated Themistocles with their finest hour.
It could not have been easy to go back to the plain homespun of democratic Athens, especially of an Athens in mourning. To the loss of its religious heart on the Acropolis, add Athens’s experience of death, dislocation, and devastation. Athenians had died at Artemisium, on the Acropolis, and in the straits of Salamis; Athenians had been dragged off in slavery to the east. A society in which suffering had been spread as evenly as it had in Athens was ready to draw an unknown soldier to its breast, but it was in no mood to crown a king.
When the war began again in the spring of 479 B.C., Themistocles commanded no Athenian army. The generals of the day were his old rivals, Aristides and Xanthippus. In all likelihood, Themistocles had failed to be reelected to the annually chosen board of ten generals, but in any case, he was out of favor. It would not be the last time that a democracy dropped a dominant leader.
To jealousy and fear of ambition, we might add another reason for Themistocles’ eclipse at home, and that is the dawning realization that the war was not over. Themistocles had been the architect of a naval strategy. Its brilliant success now guaranteed its eclipse. A second Salamis would not save Greece: this time, an infantry battle loomed.
To put it in more modern terms, Salamis was a Greek Gettysburg; it was not Appomattox Courthouse. Salamis was Stalingrad, not the battle of Berlin. Salamis was a decisive battle because it broke the Persian navy, but it did not drive the Persian
s out of Greece. Salamis brought final victory nearly into the Greeks’ hands, but it was not the last battle of the war.
Contrary to what Eurybiades had predicted at Andros in the autumn of 480 B.C., the Persians did not all leave Greece. A large enemy army remained on the Greek peninsula, threatening Attica and the Peloponnese beyond, and aided and comforted by such famous Greek states as Macedon and Thebes. In the end, only a wall of Spartan spears and a sea of Spartan blood would drive them out. The result would bring glory to Sparta but not to Eurybiades, for he was an admiral and not a general. And Athens would gain glory too, for its spearmen stood in the front lines as well and fought hard, but none of that glory would go to Themistocles.
Still, glory is not the same as power. In the aftermath of the Greek victory on land at Plataea and both on land and at sea at Mycale (a battle in 479 B.C.), Themistocles’ star rose again in Athens. As soon as they had driven Persia out of Greece, the Greeks turned on each other. To stand up to Sparta, the Athenians needed a leader who was not only brave, but ruthless and devious. Neither the ham-fisted heroics of Aristides nor the stubborn energy of Xanthippus was enough. Only Themistocles and his webs of intrigue would do.
Returned to power, Themistocles managed to defy Sparta and rebuild the walls of Athens (the Persians had destroyed them). He did this by lying through his teeth to the Spartans, his former friends. By using diplomacy as a delaying tactic, Themistocles kept them from discovering that Athens was rebuilding its walls—until it was too late. The Spartans were furious, but Athens protected itself from outside interference. Themistocles also got the Athenians to finish fortifying their new harbor at Piraeus, a project he had begun years before but which had not been completed.
Themistocles served during these years as the leading spokesman for the viewpoint that Athens’s future lay at sea. He was a tireless advocate of naval power. He urged Athenians to move to Piraeus, to find work in the dockyards there, and to think of Athens as a maritime country. In other words, he said that the fleet of Salamis was no aberration but the real Athens.
Themistocles was a revolutionary and creative thinker. But like many a prophet, he lacked honor in his homeland. His political base in the 470s was narrow, and he did not play a major role in setting up the new naval confederacy of Delos that Athens established in 477 B.C. The leadership in Athens passed to other shoulders.
And yet Themistocles was truly the father of the new Athens. He had founded the fleet and so had saved his country. But by raising Athens’s power to new heights, Themistocles also sowed the seeds of a new conflict. Fifty years after Salamis, the two former allies against Persia would lead the entire Greek world into a new and even more destructive conflict. The Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) was brutal enough to make many long for the good old days of the barbarian invasion.
For two months at the moment of their civilization’s greatest danger, Themistocles and Eurybiades had put rivalry aside. Their common effort saved Greece. But only for a while: Greek indifference to the long-term dangers of competition ultimately doomed it. The image of an Athenian and a Spartan standing side by side, each crowned with a victor’s wreath, would not be seen again.
Greece and the Ancient Near East
EPILOGUE
SUSA
He stands at the doorway of the throne room. He is poised to begin the next act in a life that already has enough drama for the most demanding muse. Themistocles is more than two thousand miles from home, but he has not seen home in years. First he was exiled from Athens in a season of political infighting. Then he was accused of treason and had to run for his life. He traveled from one end of the Greek world to the other; he begged, bribed, flirted, networked, tricked, threatened, befriended, and finally flattered his way to Persia. He has made the latest gamble in a life full of risks. Now it is time to see if it will pay off: Themistocles is about to meet the Great King. The date is probably early in the year 464 B.C. The place is the royal palace in the city of Susa, which, along with Persepolis, was a capital.
Themistocles had suffered the fate of many a politician in a democracy. The people like their leaders to rise high and to fall fast. The longer a successful politician stays on the scene, the more the public worries about what he wants. A man as cunning as Themistocles made people nervous, and it did not help to have him build a temple in Athens to Artemis of Good Advice, as if to trumpet his own genius. His political enemies were glad to unite against him, and in the late 470s he was ostracized. He lived in exile in Argos, a Spartan enemy in the Peloponnese. A few years later, Sparta claimed to find evidence that Themistocles was a Persian agent, and he fled Argos. After many adventures, he reached Susa.
With his round face and his coarse and fleshy features, Themistocles did not look like what the Persian king might have expected. How different he appeared from the statues brought back from Athens by the Persian army; those statues all had long, lean faces with tidy features. The Greek visitor who stood at the entrance to the royal audience hall looked more like a brute than a hero.
But the young king knew perfectly well who the Greek was. Artaxerxes had not been on the throne long, but he had been thoroughly briefed by his advisers. He had become king after the assassination in August 465 B.C. of his father, His Royal Majesty of Blessed Memory, Xerxes son of Darius, King of Kings. Xerxes was murdered in a court intrigue. And now, Artaxerxes, seated on his throne, was about to receive his father’s old foe. Of all the double-dealing Greeks who stank of the salt air of the Aegean Sea, none was more treacherous than Themistocles.
Artaxerxes surely knew it. Neither he nor his advisers was likely to have been fooled by the letter written to him by Themistocles, in which the Athenian claimed that he had saved Xerxes in 480 B.C. by talking the Greeks out of destroying the bridges over the Hellespont. At the sight of Themistocles, Artaxerxes might have wanted to get up and grab a spear from one of his bodyguards and run the rotten Athenian through. But then, he probably also knew that the old Greek would be full of precious secrets. And having Themistocles on the Persian payroll was a propaganda bonanza. And so young Artaxerxes received in the hall of the heir of Cyrus the Great the worst enemy that his beloved father had ever faced.
The Greeks might have been surprised to know it, but the Persians probably mourned Xerxes as a great man. During his reign, Xerxes was a builder who constructed the greatest of the royal palaces at the city of Persepolis. He was a warrior who crushed rebellions in Egypt and Babylon. And he was a strategist who might have been remembered in Persia not as the man who lost a war with Greece but, rather, as the king who rectified the western border. Xerxes understood, as others did not, that the forces of the empire were spread too thin. It was necessary to pull back the imperial borders in the West. But first, he taught the Greeks a lesson.
The Great King’s expedition to the land of the Greek barbarians truly represented one of the greatest achievements in history, or so the Persians might have thought. With the help of heaven, the King of Kings bridged the Hellespont. He gathered so many troops and ships that they darkened the horizon. After forcing every city in his path to offer him its hospitality, His Majesty crushed the Spartan army at Thermopylae and killed the evil king Leonidas. Then he took Athens, burned to the ground the temples of the false and lying gods, devastated the land, and sold into slavery all the inhabitants who had not fled. Having subjected to his will every land from Thrace to the Isthmus of Corinth, His Majesty imposed tribute and returned in the finest of form to Anatolia.
There were, of course, the usual errors made by the Great King’s slaves. The unfortunate Mardonius lost his life in an ambush by Greek barbarians when his army was withdrawing after its pacification campaign. And Artaxerxes had heard something about a skirmish of ships near some island called Salamis, in which the king of Sidon had been embarrassed by certain Greek captains. But after making a show of force, the Persian army had withdrawn behind secure borders.
In 477 B.C. Athens had created a new naval alliance of Greek ci
ty-states. It was formed on the island of Delos, located in the central part of the Aegean Sea and sacred to the god Apollo. Historians usually refer to the alliance as the Delian League. This alliance consisted of about 150 Greek city-states of the Aegean islands, Euboea and the northeastern coast of Greece, the Sea of Marmara, and the west coast of Anatolia. Athens held the rank of leader of the alliance. Many of these city-states had formerly been subjects of the Great King.
Persia required its subjects to pay tribute. Athens did the same thing. To be effective, the Delian League needed to have a strong fleet, and naval power was expensive. So with the exception of a few member states, who contributed warships or men, all of the members of the Delian League paid tribute to Athens. The Greek city-states substituted one imperial power for another.
From its very founding, the Delian League committed itself to expansion. Not only did its members promise to defend Greece against any new attack by Persia, they also swore to attack the lands of the Great King in order to avenge the damage done to Greece by Xerxes in 480 B.C. and to acquire booty.
The Delian League was created and grew at Persia’s expense, but the Persians might have taken it in stride. They might have seen things like this: just because the Persian imperial treasury had liquidated the cost of maintaining tyrants in Greek cities like Samos and Miletus, which now belonged to the Delian League, a certain amount of nonsense had been bruited about as to the liberation of the Ionians. The Greeks might babble on, but the Persian satrap of Ionia still sat in Sardis. Persian horsemen continued to ride the rich river valleys of Anatolia that run inland from the Aegean Sea. Some Greek cities on the Anatolian coast still paid the Great King’s annual tribute; what difference did it make if some of them also paid out protection money to the Athenians?
The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece -- and Western Civilization Page 27