The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq

by Victor Davis Hanson

  1. The building of the armada. Had Themistocles earlier (483) not urged the Athenians to build their fleet with the sudden revenues from the unexpected strike at the silver mines of Laurium, there would probably have been no chance for a Greek defense at Salamis. Themistocles plowed ahead against the advice of most Athenians, quite contrary to the received infantry wisdom from the recent victory at Marathon. That he claimed the ships were necessary to defeat a nearby widely hated and tangible enemy like Aegina—Pericles later called the nearby island the “eyesore” of the Piraeus—perhaps made the radical measure more palatable. In short, Themistocles alone appropriated the money, invested it in a navy, and so had a fleet on hand ready to save Athens.

  2. The abandonment of the city. Had Themistocles not persuaded the Athenians in September 480 to evacuate Athens and the surrounding Attic countryside, their hoplite land army would have been wiped out in a futile Thermopylae-like last stand. An orphaned fleet would have retreated southward or westward. Had the Athenians stayed inside the largely indefensible city to withstand a siege, they would have likewise perished in toto or been forced to join the Persians. Nor after Thermopylae did Themistocles try to persuade the Greek allies to march northward to stop the Persians in the plains of Boeotia or Attica. Of course, Themistocles had fought at Marathon and co-commanded the failed defense at Tempe in the summer of 480. Yet he knew by mid-September that the gallant veterans of Marathon could not overcome ten-to-one odds. Even the infantry fight the next year at Plataea was a close-run thing—and winnable only after tens of thousands of Persians had been killed at Salamis or retreated home. The victory was also predicated on a massive mobilization of tens of thousands of Panhellenic soldiers, most of whom mustered only after hearing that Xerxes had fled Greece in defeat.

  There were no other Athenians in the historical record who had advocated so radical a measure as trying to save the city by allowing it to be burned—twice. Later Athenians, most notably the general Nicias on Sicily, would rally their troops with reminders that “Men make a city, not walls,” calling on the miraculous tradition of Athenian victory. Themistocles’ postwar efforts to fortify Athens were followed by the efforts of Pericles after his death to build two extensive Long Walls connecting the city to the Piraeus. Both projects emphasized how determined subsequent generations were never to repeat the horror of 480 in abandoning the city along with its surrounding countryside.

  The leader Pericles was a Themistoclean at heart. He argued that the best way to defeat Sparta in the Peloponnesian War (431–404) was to fight at sea after abandoning the defense of Athenian farmland against Spartan ravagers. But unlike Themistocles, Pericles advocated such a strategy only with the reassurance that the city and its port at Piraeus were safe behind stout walls, inside which the entire Attic population could find safety from enemy invasion.

  3. Drawing the line at Salamis. Although most southern Greeks came to understand at the eleventh hour that Themistocles’ logic was in their own interests in providing a forward defense for the Peloponnese and in keeping the Athenian fleet engaged in the Greek defense, there was still no guarantee that the Peloponnesians would fight at Salamis—given their near completion of a massive wall at the Isthmus. To read Plutarch’s Life of Themistocles is to review a list of ancient attacks on both the character and wisdom of Themistocles on the eve of battle. So two further actions of Themistocles were required to guarantee a fight at Salamis and then to achieve victory there.48

  The ruse of Sicinnus persuaded the Persians immediately to rush into battle and thereby to force the wavering non-Athenian Greeks to stay and fight. Scholars are divided over the authenticity of the tale. But there is reason to accept the general truth of the ancient account: At the point when the alliance was about to break up, the news was announced to the Greek admirals that the Persians were already launching their triremes and thus all approaches in and out of the Salamis channel were to be blocked. Only then did the galvanized Greeks discover that they could no longer retreat to the Isthmus. The sole choice was either to fight immediately or surrender.49

  Because Themistocles had persuaded the Persians into committing their ships into the narrow channels, it is probable that the actual plan of the Greek deployment was also his as well. The secret to the Greek success was to draw the cumbersome enemy fleet further into the narrows and thus ensure that it could not utilize its overwhelming numerical advantage. Themistocles had the Greek ships initially row backward. That induced the Persians to row further into the channel, on the assumption that the Greeks were in fact trying to flee as their fifth-column “intelligence” had indicated. When the two fleets collided, the Persians—again, as Themistocles had planned—were dispersed and not in good order, and unable to bring their full strength against the ordered Greek armada.

  Controversy surrounds yet another supposed Themistoclean stratagem—the purported postwar second secret message to the defeated Xerxes urging him to sail home while Themistocles prevented the Greeks from reaching his bridges at the Hellespont first and destroying easy entry back into Asia. If this second effort at deception was also true, then it had the added effect of encouraging another split in Persian forces after the battle and drew off further Persian manpower. That meant at the subsequent battle of Plataea the following August, the enemy forces under Mardonius were not all that much more numerous than the assembled Panhellenic Greek army.50

  Themistoclean Counterfactuals

  The ancient verdict on the genius of Themistocles was unanimous. If his later career was checkered, his character dubious, and his end shameful, he remained the most gifted strategist that classical antiquity ever produced. Proof of that ancient assessment is found in imagining what might have happened had Themistocles failed to galvanize the Greeks at Salamis.51

  There are no large islands immediately off the Hellenic coast to the south off the Isthmus of Corinth. Nor are there many bays or inlets on the northeastern shore of the Argolid peninsula to offer shelter for a retreating Greek fleet, in which to nullify the numerical advantages of the Persian armada. Even if the Athenians could have been convinced to leave Salamis and fight far to the south—perhaps transporting their refugees on Aegina and Salamis southward to join those already on Troizen—they were still down to only two poor alternatives of defense: a sea battle in the more open waters off the Isthmus, or a last-ditch land defense behind the fortifications of the Isthmus itself. Neither offered hope of victory. The former strategy would have probably meant being swarmed by a superior fleet in open waters; the latter option ensured being surrounded and outflanked by numerous enemy amphibious landings.

  Herodotus reports a speech of Themistocles in which he rejected just this sort of a naval engagement off Corinth. Instead, he tried to convince the Spartan admiral Eurybiades of the merits of his strategy “to save Hellas”:

  If you fight the enemy at the Isthmus, you will battle in open waters—just where it is to our worst advantage, since our ships are heavier and less in number. In addition, you will give up Salamis, Megara, and Aigina—even if we should win a victory there. And their infantry force will follow their fleet. And so you will lead them to the Peloponnese, and endanger all of Greece.52

  In contrast, Themistocles added that a fight at Salamis would ensure that the Peloponnesians might delay their enemies from approaching the Isthmus and keep them far distant from their own territory. Only a victory at Salamis might save both Athens and the Peloponnese. Even a success at the Isthmus was too late for the salvation of Attica. The key for the Greek defense, then, was to keep its two greatest powers, Athens and Sparta, both committed to the spirit of Panhellenic defense after the catastrophic defeats and withdrawal from Thermopylae. Themistocles knew that tens of thousands of Athenians, both sailors and civilians, had not made it to Troizen and Aegina. Most were still stuck on Salamis. There they faced immediate enslavement or death if the Greek fleet abandoned them to the Persians, and they were largely without supplies or shelter if the Greeks delayed much longe
r.

  Mnesiphilos, an Athenian elder, had also warned Themistocles earlier that should the Greeks not fight at Salamis, there was little chance that the Panhellenic armada would ever again assemble as one fleet, even at the Isthmus. “Everyone,” Mnesiphilos predicted, “will withdraw to their own city-states. Neither Eurybiades nor any other man will be able to hold them together. Rather, the armada will break apart.” For that very reason, Herodotus relates that the Carian queen Artemesia advised the Persians to avoid Salamis. She cautioned the king to wait and then gradually head south by land to the Isthmus. She further argued that a sea battle at Salamis would give the beleaguered Greeks one last, and unnecessary, chance to unite to stop the Persian onslaught.53

  Nevertheless, the Peloponnesians in Herodotus’ account clung stubbornly to the idea of a land defense. They were fortifying the isthmus even as their admirals debated for time at Salamis. At one point, Herodotus says that Themistocles (until he sent Sicinnus to dupe the Persians into starting the fight) had “lost the argument” with the Peloponnesian admirals. There is also good reason to believe, as Herodotus foresaw, that such an infantry defense would have failed.

  Again, an intact Persian fleet could easily have landed troops to the rear all along the coast of the Peloponnese. A half century later, even with a fleet only a third the size of the Persians’, the Athenians employed with success that strategy of seaborne raiding on the Peloponnese throughout the Archidamian War (431–421 B.C.). The meandering stone wall at the Isthmus, connecting the Corinthian and Saronic Gulfs, would probably have extended nearly six miles. In later Greek history, no defending force was able to keep out invaders from the north by walling the Isthmus. The Theban general Epaminondas between 370 and 362 B.C. on four occasions easily brushed aside resistance there, both on his southward and northward passages between Boeotia and the Peloponnese. Herodotus, then, seems correct in asserting that defense behind a wall at the Isthmus was no real alternative to a naval engagement off Salamis.

  * * *

  The Greek success at Salamis did not destroy the Persian fleet outright. Nor did the naval victory entirely rid Attica of the Persians. Rather, Salamis was the critical point in the war that turned a certain lost cause into a possible victory. Themistocles’ triumph ensured that the Persians—absent their king, the imperial fleet sunk or in retreat, and their infantry demoralized—could not win the war outright under any conditions. The victorious Greeks had the advantages of logistics, knowledge of local terrain, and morale—and for the first time in the war, the “land itself became their ally.”54

  The Character of Themistocles

  When Themistocles surveyed the dead Persians that littered the shores after the battle of Salamis, he told an acquaintance to feel free to strip them of their gold jewelry: “Help yourself—you are not Themistocles.” A number of similar anecdotes about Themistocles attest to his sense of moral superiority, and his need to be appreciated by the Athenians whom he had saved. Ancient historians agree on some general themes in their discussion of the character of Themistocles—arrogance toward others, and absolute confidence in his own wisdom and leadership. Themistocles was not averse to scheming to ostracize his rivals. He freely faked omens to frighten the more pious into his fold. He sent duplicitous messages to the enemy. And he certainly tricked the gullible Spartans into allowing the Athenians to fortify their city.55

  As a scrapper, he had learned that such unprincipled behavior was necessary in his unlikely rise to the leadership of the Athenians. As a new man, he was not invested in protection of the landed estates of the aristocracy and their mannered behavior. He had no allegiance to the Marathon men. He may not have had much compunction in abandoning the prominent tombs and shrines of the Athenian aristocracy in order to save the city proper. Both Herodotus and Plutarch associate bribery and deceit with almost every great end that Themistocles achieved (including, and especially, his year of generalship before and after Salamis). His dearth of ancient virtue explains why, after the incredible victory at Salamis, the principal Greek commanders there chose not to vote him the prize of excellence for his inspired leadership.

  Sea power, fortification, and evacuation were originally unpalatable for aristocratic grandees. But these concepts for a pragmatic general like Themistocles were seen simply as useful or not. He was determined only to lead Athens and transform it into a radically democratic society that would naturally inherit the Aegean. The ancients were ambivalent about Themistocles: Unconventional strategies alone had saved Athens and augmented her collective power, but only a rogue like Themistocles could dream up and implement them. Salamis was a great victory, but it empowered Themistocles to change the nature of Athens for the worse.

  Tactical insight on the battlefield, and even grand strategy, are not in themselves enough to restore the sagging wartime fortunes of a democracy. Themistocles’ legacy was not merely enticing Xerxes to fight where he should not at Salamis and then drawing up a battle plan that would offer a good chance for his defeat. Rather, Salamis was the logical dividend of a far more complex Themistoclean vision. Under his leadership, the city would learn to privilege its majority population without land. Athenians would come to appreciate that ships were not merely superior assets to infantry and essential to maritime empire and defense, but they empowered the poor with wages and prestige. Under Themistocles’ leadership, the Athenians would agree that Persia could be not only defeated, but utterly defeated, and in such a fashion that the resulting void in the Aegean would naturally favor the emergence of a new Athenian empire in its place.

  Themistocles’ vision would not only later provide the foundation for Pericles’ maritime empire, but also, a half century later, for the forced evacuation during the Peloponnesian War that resulted in the destruction of a quarter of the population due to a plague that broke out in such close quarters. The great divider Themistocles also bequeathed an intensification of class strife between hoplite landowners and landless sailors. The near-centurylong animosity toward Sparta ultimately led to the defeat of Athens. Later conservative thinkers cited Salamis as the beginning of the end of the old polis of virtue, as the state began to redistribute money and create dependency. But that was all in the future. It was the responsibility of successors to embrace, expand, modify, or reject Themistoclean strategy that was aimed in his generation at thwarting the existential threat of Persia—and succeeded brilliantly at just that task.

  Ancient observers also remarked on the superior morale of the Greeks at Salamis. The Greeks saw themselves as “slaves of no one.” In the romantic tradition, rowers purportedly chanted out “Free your native land, free your children, free your wives, and free the seats of your fathers’ gods and the tombs of your ancestors” as they sought to ram the king’s ships. If the Greeks believed in their own innate superiority over the Persians, Themistocles himself was convinced of the singularity of his own Athens. He was proud of his Hellenism, but at Salamis, Themistocles sought to save his own city and further the aims of what it was to be an Athenian—namely, to invent the Western notion of a state in arms that drew on the participation of all its citizens across class lines.56

  What made Themistocles a great captain was his ability to craft strategy to reflect national character: Sea power not only embodied the city’s real strengths, but would alone make Athens preeminent among the Greek poleis. It was, after all, about the only serious means by which to bring nearly half the population of Athens to the fore, given long-held Greek prejudices about status, land, infantry participation and equipment, and state defense. To further that aim of changing Athens into a naval power, Themistocles was better informed and more experienced than both his enemies and his associate commanders. No general in either fleet had such varied strategic and tactical experience in warfare of the ancient Mediterranean.

  Xerxes was perched on a throne; Themistocles, in the fashion of Greek battle leaders, was in a lead trireme. Most Greek generals did not confide in slaves; Sicinnus was intimate with Themistocle
s, whose natural affinities were with the rank and file. Persian generals bowed to Xerxes; Greek commanders threatened to hit Themistocles. Themistocles was not just more of a soldiers’ general than Xerxes, but also more than all his fellow Greek generals.

  It was a habit of ancient historians to compare great captains of Greece and Rome to assess the most gifted. By the standards of ancient reckoning, Themistocles was considered preeminent, not merely because he was successful, but because his success seemed the dividend of a systematic military and military mind. Diodorus, following the fourth-century Greek historian Ephoros, lists a number of reasons why Themistocles was the greatest man Greece produced (megistos Hellênôn). With the fewest resources, Themistocles achieved the greatest results, not just in ridding the Aegean of the Persians, but also in dethroning the Spartans from their historic preeminent position in Greece and establishing the subsequent course of Athenian imperialism. His brilliance won the battle of Salamis, but also in peacetime led to Athenian naval hegemony.57

  The historian Thucydides, not necessarily a fan of Athenian democracy himself, saw even more clearly how Themistocles had alone saved Athens and “surpassed all others.” In a long encomium, he claims Themistocles defeated Xerxes by his innate intelligence and the rare trait of foresight—the singular ability to see how things that should never happen might well indeed occur at least one time in the future. Had Themistocles lost, mainland Greece would have gone the way of conquered Ionia, where its sixth-century-B.C. Greek renaissance by the fifth had clearly stagnated under Persian rule. One need not be a cultural chauvinist to appreciate that Persian culture had very different ideas about personal freedom, democracy, the rights of the individual, and rationalism. Quite simply, without the savior general Themistocles, the world as we know it today might have been a very different place indeed.