Meanwhile, the strategy of His Late Majesty, may his name be blessed, had worked beautifully. The Greek barbarians had been left to do what they did best: kill each other. Athens was building up a naval empire in the Aegean Sea, while the Spartans fumed and plotted a war against the rising power of Athens before it became too late.
Artaxerxes could not know it, but the Persian Empire would last another 150 years after Salamis. There would be no more expansion, but after the losses to Athens of the 470s and 460s, the Persians would manage to hold on to their empire, with only the occasional rebellion to suppress here and there. The Delian League lasted just seventy-five years. After it disappeared in 404 B.C., the Great King used a combination of diplomacy and bribery to keep the Greeks divided and off guard. Only the rise of a new power, Macedonia, led by its kings Philip and Alexander, finally brought down the Persian Empire in 330 B.C.
Meanwhile, the Persians could have smiled knowingly at the saying that imitation is the sincerest sort of flattery. No sooner was the Delian League founded than it began to look a lot like the Persian Empire. Athenian allies rose in revolt as Persian allies had done in the past. Athenian generals sailed out with fleets to fight rebels, whom they then executed or enslaved just as the Persians had tried to do to Athenians at Salamis. Athenian politicians began to put on imperial airs, writing memos not about their “allies” but “the cities Athens controls.” Athenian consumers developed a taste for Persian clothes and Persian art—but that only made sense, because imperial powers are naturally attracted to each other.
Within two generations of creating one of the world’s first democracies, Athens had achieved the remarkable feat of also creating the world’s first imperial democracy. At home, Athens stood for freedom and equality. Abroad, Athens did not hesitate to use any means necessary in order to enforce the authority of the league that it led. After making a heroic stand against Xerxes in the name of freedom, Athens had discovered that in order to maintain its freedom, it would have to make difficult compromises abroad.
Salamis, it has been said, was a great battle because, without that victory, the world would have been deprived of the glory that was Greece. But that underestimates the resiliency and the drive of Greek civilization.
If the Greeks had lost at Salamis, Xerxes would have gone on to conquer the Peloponnese. Themistocles and the surviving Athenians would have fled to southern Italy. And there, they might well have recovered. Just as mainland Greece saved Ionia in 480 B.C. and afterward, so Greek Italy might have saved mainland Greece. Athens in exile might have roused the western Greeks to arms against the invader. Together, they might eventually have sailed back to Greece and driven out the barbarian with blood and iron.
Or perhaps the exiles would have stayed in southern Italy. They might have thrived there. So even if the Greeks had lost at Salamis, the ancient Greeks might well have gone on to create classical civilization—in exile in Italy. But they would not have invented imperial democracy.
Defeat at Salamis would not have deprived the world of Greece’s glory but of its guile and greed. Salamis offered Athens the first taste of the temptation that it could not resist. Thanks to Salamis, Athens was free and Greece would be enslaved. Democracy was saved and the Athenian empire was born.
And it was precisely the contradiction of democracy and empire that made Athens so exciting for a century and more after Salamis. Athens failed to live up to its ideal of freedom, and failure generated critics. They included historians like Herodotus and Thucydides and poets like Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes. And they included the most cutting critic of them all: Socrates. And Socrates led to Plato, Aristotle, and the Western tradition of political philosophy. That tradition, the debate over democracy and its discontents, is the true legacy of Salamis, and the final reason it might just have been the greatest battle of the ancient world—and certainly its greatest naval battle.
In the years after Salamis, Athens headed down the road of democracy and empire. Meanwhile, the steady stream of Greek political exiles to the Great King’s court did not stop flowing. And now—to return to the scene at Susa in 464 B.C.—Artaxerxes son of Xerxes an Achaemenid the King of Kings was about to pick the finest fruit of all.
The Great King motioned for the Greek stranger to enter. Themistocles advanced. They say that Greeks were too proud and freedom-loving to bow down to the ground before the Great King as all his subjects did. We do not know how Themistocles behaved on the occasion, but afterward gossip claimed that he prostrated himself without hesitation.
That night, the story goes, Artaxerxes called out three times in his sleep: “I have Themistocles the Athenian!”
Themistocles’ audience with Artaxerxes was a success. The Athenian asked for and received a year to learn the Persian language and Persian customs. When he returned to see the Great King again, he impressed Artaxerxes as a man of genius. The king made Themistocles governor of the Ionian city of Magnesia, located inland in the rich valley of the Meander River. Magnesia was to provide Themistocles “his bread,” and he was also given control of the nearby city of Myos “for his meat” and of the city of Lampsacus on the Hellespont “for his wine,” the Lampsacus region being famous for its wines. Themistocles’ family had joined him in exile, and in Magnesia his female relatives served as priestesses of the temple of Artemis.
And so the strategist of victory over the Persian fleet at Salamis, the battle that began the transfer of the Aegean Sea from Persian to Greek control; the founder of the Athenian navy and the visionary who turned his native city from a second-rate land power into a maritime giant; the man who had humiliated Xerxes and smashed his sea power—this man now crossed the Aegean Sea to live out his life in comfortable exile with his family, an administrator in the Persian provinces and a vassal of Xerxes’ son, the Great King Artaxerxes I.
Themistocles died in Magnesia in 459 B.C. Egypt had risen in revolt from Persia again, and Athens had sent ships to the Nile to help the rebels. Legend says that Themistocles poisoned himself rather than follow the Great King’s order to make war on Athens. But he probably died of natural causes. A monument to Themistocles was put up in the marketplace of Magnesia. Meanwhile, his family followed his last wish by secretly bringing his bones home and reburying them in Athenian soil. Or so it was said. Certainly, Athenian law forbade the burial in Attica of a traitor, as Themistocles had been judged. But there were probably many Athenians in 459 B.C. who would have been happy to honor their old commander with a good Greek grave at home.
Themistocles was not the only veteran of Salamis to see his life take unexpected turns after the battle. Consider the Greek side first, beginning with Athenians. In 480 B.C., Themistocles’ old rival Aristides still had his finest hour ahead. In August 479 Aristides commanded Athens’s infantry at the battle of Plataea, thereby going down in history as one of Greece’s saviors. Not long afterward, Aristides helped Themistocles trick the Spartans while Athens surrounded itself with a defensive wall. In 477, Aristides made the first assessment of tribute for the members of the Delian League. But little money stuck to his fingers, because when he died around 468, he died a poor man. He was buried at Phaleron, a fitting reminder of the night when Aristides helped tip the balance against the Persian fleet that was moored there. His son, Lysimachus, was a famous failure; his grandson, also named Aristides, probably died in active service during the Peloponnesian War.
Aeschylus went on after 480 B.C. to great glory as a dramatist. In addition to the plays The Persians in 472 and Seven Against Thebes in 467, he offered his classic trilogy Oresteia in 458. Afterward he visited Greek Sicily, where he died and was buried in the city of Gela in 456. Two of his sons also became dramatists.
After his victory in the battle of Mycale in 479 B.C., the Athenian general Xanthippus sailed to the Hellespont to lay siege to the city of Sestus. Sestus sits on the European side of the Hellespont, opposite the city of Abydos: the twin cities command the crossing of the strait. In fact, Sestus was the firs
t European city entered by Xerxes when he crossed the Hellespont in 480 B.C. After a months-long siege, Sestus fell to Xanthippus and his men in the spring of 478.
Xanthippus died not long afterward (the precise year is not known), but he left behind a very ambitious son: Pericles. A teenage refugee in 480 B.C., Pericles eventually became first man in Athens. But first he had to defeat a rival. Cimon, the clever young conservative who hung up his horse bridle before Salamis, dominated Athenian politics in the 460s. He won big victories in the East against Persia. But Pericles managed to discredit Cimon and replace him.
From 460 to 430 B.C., Pericles would lead Athens to its Golden Age. It was under Pericles that the city completed its democratic revolution. It was under Pericles as well that the Delian League became the greatest maritime empire that the Mediterranean had ever known. With the tribute collected from that empire, Pericles funded the greatest building project in Greek history: Athens rebuilt the temples on the Acropolis that Xerxes’ men had destroyed in September 480. Forty-two years later, in 438 B.C., the centerpiece of that rebuilding program was dedicated—the most famous building of ancient Greece: the Parthenon.
Sicinnus, the slave of Themistocles, presumably lived out his days comfortably as a citizen of the small city-state of Thespiae in central Greece. Thespiae lies to the west of Thebes, in a fertile valley in the foothills of Mount Helicon, known in legend as the home of the Muses. In its heroic days in 480 B.C., Thespiae stood up to Xerxes and was destroyed. But the city that was rebuilt after the war had time to devote to its favorite deity, Eros, the god of love. Sicinnus, we may imagine, enjoyed life as a Thespian, telling stories about his fateful meetings with the Great King.
In the Peloponnese, Adimantus of Corinth passed on his grudge against Athens to the next generation. His son Aristeas, a charismatic military commander, led a Corinthian force of so-called volunteers in an undeclared conflict with Athens in 432 B.C. When the Peloponnesian War formally broke out soon afterward, Aristeas went on a military mission to the Great King, whose aid he wanted to enlist against Athens. But Aristeas was captured en route and executed by the Athenian state in 430 B.C.
It is unclear whether Phayllos ever made it home again to Croton, but his memory lived on. After conquering the Persian army at the battle of Gaugamela in northern Iraq in 330 B.C. Alexander the Great sent a portion of the booty to far-off Croton, in recognition of Phayllos’s contribution to victory at Salamis.
Some of the other principals in the battle of Salamis leave no trace in the historical record after 480 B.C. Eurybiades of Sparta, for instance, commander of the Greek fleet, is not heard of again, nor is the hardy Aeginetan marine Pytheas of Aegina, nor the proud Aeginetan captain Polycritus, nor the Athenian ace Aminias of Pallene. On the Persian side, Tetramnestus, king of Sidon, is not attested after Salamis. The eunuch Hermotimus disappears after 480 into the winding corridors of the palaces at Persepolis and Susa.
Mardonius, the chief war hawk of Xerxes’ expedition, died on the battlefield at Plataea in 479 B.C. One of his daggers ended up in Athens, on the Acropolis, as part of the Athenian share of enemy booty, a total take amounting to five hundred talents, which represented three million days’ wages at the time. Mardonius’s dagger weighed five and a half pounds. Apparently it was made of pure gold.
Xerxes’ brother and Artaxerxes’ uncle Achaemenes was still alive in 464 B.C. He was governor of Egypt (at Salamis, he had commanded the Egyptian squadron). He would die fighting an Egyptian rebellion in 459.
An anecdote survives that Xerxes rewarded Demaratus of Sparta for having told him the hard truth about the enemy’s strength: he let him name the reward of his choice. Demaratus is supposed to have asked to enter the city of Sardis, the pride of Anatolia, riding in a chariot and wearing the tiara, the privilege of royalty. In other words, Demaratus asked to be recognized again as a king, and with a Near Eastern splendor unheard of in Sparta. Whether or not there is any truth in this story, it is certain that Demaratus and his descendants continued to flourish in the Persian Empire. Darius had given the Spartan exile land and the governorship of three Anatolian cities not far from Troy: Halisarna, Teuthrania, and Pergamum. And his descendants would weather every storm to maintain their grip on these cities for two centuries, until after the death of Alexander the Great.
No details survive of Artemisia’s activities after 480 B.C. We do not know how or when she died. But the dynasty that she had worked so hard to promote during Xerxes’ expedition was still alive and well a generation later. Sometime around 460 or 450 B.C., her son or nephew Lygdamis ruled as king of Halicarnassus, as an inscription of that date shows. His position was a tribute to his survival skills. Up and down the west coast of Anatolia in the 470s and 460s B.C., the Athenian navy drove out the Persians and the rulers who supported them. One by one the kings, princes, and tyrants fell, except, that is, for a few supple rulers who managed to switch allegiances as easily as a hunter might switch arrows. Lygdamis of Halicarnassus was one of the success stories.
If Herodotus had managed to have his way, Lygdamis would have been a failure. As a young man in Halicarnassus, the future historian joined a rebellion against the ruling house. But the rebellion failed and Herodotus went into exile—and the rest is history.
SOURCES
The reader who wants to learn more about the battle of Salamis is in for a treat and an effort. In what follows I list only the main works that have been of use in the making of this book. The information below is by no means a complete record of the works and sources I have consulted.
Ancient Sources
The indispensable starting point is Herodotus, in particular, the eighth book, but each part of Herodotus has to be understood in the context of the whole work. Good recent translations in English include John Marincola’s revision, with introduction and notes, of Aubrey de Sélincourt’s version (Herodotus, The Histories: New Edition [Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1996]), and Robin Waterfield’s translation, with introduction and notes by Carolyn Dewald (Herodotus, The Histories [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998]). The historical commentary on Herodotus by W. W. How and J. Wells, A Commentary on Herodotus, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1928]), is too short and too old but nonetheless very good. Focusing more on literary than historical issues, Agostino Masaracchia offers a good commentary on the eighth book of Herodotus in Erodoto, La battaglia di Salamina: libro VIII delle Storie /Erodoto (Milan: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, A. Mondadori, 1977).
The starting point for my inquiry is the conviction that Herodotus is a great historian, offering by and large a fair and accurate account. A superb defense of Herodotus’s accuracy can be found in W. Kendrick Pritchett, The Liar School of Herodotus. (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1993). Perhaps the most important of the witnesses for the prosecution, that is, the accusers of Herodotus as a falsifier and myth maker, is Detlev Fehling, Herodotus and His Sources: Citation, Invention, and Narrative Art, trans. by J. G. Howie (Leeds, Eng.: Francis Cairns, 1989). A good, brief introduction to Herodotus is John Gould, Herodotus (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989). A short but thoughtful study of Herodotus on Xerxes’ invasion is Gabriella Bodei Giglioni, Erodoto e I sogni di Serse. L’invasione persiana dell’ Europa. Saggine 55. (Rome: Donzinelli Editore, 2002). For the impact of the Peloponnesian War on Herodotus’s thinking, see C. J. Fornara, Herodotus: An Interpretive Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 75–91.
The second most important ancient source about Salamis is Aeschylus’s play The Persians. Good translations include Janet Lembke and C. J. Herington, Aeschylus: Persians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Seth Benardete in David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds., Aeschylus II, 2nd ed. The Complete Greek Tragedies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). For a historical and literary commentary see H. D. Broad-head, The Persae of Aeschylus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
The third most important work is Plutarch’s Life of Themistocles, available, in Greek and in English translation, along
with two other relevant texts, his Life of Aristides and Life of Cimon, in Plutarch, Lives, vol. 2: Themistocles and Camillus, Aristides and Cato Major, Cimon and Lucullus, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001 [1914]). Plutarch’s Life of Themistocles should ideally be read along with the very good notes in Frank J. Frost, Plutarch’s Themistocles: A Historical Commentary, rev. ed. (Chicago: Ares Publishers, 1998) or in Carlo Carena, Mario Manfredini, and Luigi Piccirilli, Plutarco, Le Vite di Temistocle e di Camillo (Milan: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla: A. Mondadori, 1996). The student of Salamis should also see the critique of Herodotus in Plutarch’s essay “On the Malice of Herodotus,” now available with introduction, Greek and English texts, and commentary in A. J. Bowen, Plutarch: The Malice of Herodotus (Warminster, Eng.: Aris & Phillips, 1992).
Next in importance among ancient authors comes Diodorus Siculus, whose account of Artemisium and Salamis can be read in English translation in C. H. Oldfather, trans., Diodorus of Sicily, vol. 4 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939), 155–175 (11.12.1–19.6). This Sicilian Greek lived in the era of the emperor Augustus and compiled a universal history of the Mediterranean world. It is thought that Diodorus drew his account of Salamis from the now missing work of Ephorus of Cyme, a fourth century B.C. Greek historian.
Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War not only contains important information about Themistocles and Salamis, but it is a gold mine of material about trireme strategy and tactics. An excellent English edition is Robert Strassler, ed., The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (New York: Free Press, 1996).
The Themistocles Decree can be read in translation in M. Crawford and D. Whitehead, eds., Archaic and Classical Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 224–225, no. 112.
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