by Ted Stewart
Too many Greeks had proven willing to sell their countrymen or lay down their arms. Entire cities had joined with Xerxes, driven by greed or fear. Surely the mighty Xerxes had come to think poorly of his countrymen, expecting a traitor at every turn.
Which was an expectation that Themistocles now planned to take advantage of.
• • •
The Greek stood proudly before the king. He wore the battle dress of a soldier, and he stood tall and firm. He claimed to be a valued servant to Themistocles, even a close friend, and Xerxes watched him carefully, looking down from his mighty throne. Behind him, the ruins of the Acropolis still smoldered. They had been smoldering for days. The Greek held his ground, his eyes bright and unblinking, as if he had no fear.
“Say it again!” Xerxes commanded.
“The men of Themistocles are in disarray,” the Greek repeated. Though it ground against his soul to say it, he found the words came surprisingly easy, for most of what he said was true. “Many don’t want to fight you, at least not right here and not right now. They have seen your mighty army. Your splendid navy. Their small victories at sea have not brought them comfort. They know what is in store. Some have attempted to escape from Salamis, and many others plan to escape soon. Even Themistocles has threatened to take the two hundred ships of Athens and leave. He talks of sailing away and starting a new colony far from the reach of the mighty Xerxes and your fearful army.” The Greek’s voice fell almost to a whisper. “Some of the men at Salamis . . . maybe even many . . . would join you, Lord Xerxes, if they saw an appropriate reward.”
The men of the court of Xerxes listened. Most of his commanders smiled.
Xerxes looked around, seeing the eagerness on their faces. It was what they had expected, what they had been waiting to hear. The Greeks were worn and weary. They had sent their best men, given their best battle, and but a few of them had lived. The hordes of Persians had run throughout Greece, taking Athens by storm, burning their holy mountain, cradle of their gods. The Greeks must have watched the fires, smelled the smoke, seen their abandoned city filled with Persian warriors. Though they had won a battle or two at sea, they must have known that they had no real hope of defeating the Persians, not as hopelessly outnumbered as they were.
The shah of Persia raised a hand, motioning for a servant. The man drew near, listened to the master, nodded, and turned around. Moving almost at a run, he went to an ivory-inlaid box, extracted a large map, and laid it at the master’s feet. Xerxes pointed at it with a golden scepter, looking at his naval commander. “Salamis is but a few miles off the coast,” he said. “Themistocles has his entire navy anchored there.”
“Yes, lord, he has hidden his ships out of sight . . .” the commander bent and touched the map . . . “here, behind this small island.”
Xerxes looked at the map and thought. “The channels between the mainland and Salamis are very narrow.”
“Very narrow, lord.”
No one spoke. The commander knew not to interrupt his master with such a look on his face. And the Greek spy had already said everything he had been told to say.
Xerxes moved silently around the chart, always staring down, his dark eyes bright and thoughtful, his face calm. “Very narrow channels,” he repeated. “So when they try to flee, they will have to exit through either the channel on the west or to the east. If we divide our forces, we can guard both means of escape. If we position our best naval forces here,” he indicated toward the western channel, “we can stop the Greeks from escaping to the west. The Egyptians proved themselves very worthy at the battle of Artemisium. Send them there. At the same time, we will position other naval squadrons to attack and keep them from fleeing to the east.”
The naval commander thought, then nodded. There were great risks in dividing his forces, he knew, but it seemed like a reasonable plan. And even if it weren’t, there was no way he was going to argue with the king.
Xerxes looked around at his commanders, all of whom were itching for a fight. “Wait until dark,” he commanded, “then send the Egyptian ships to cover the western channel of escape. Position our other forces on the east. Tell them to row into position and wait there. Keep their oarsmen at the ready. I care not how cold or tired or hungry they become. Tell them if they let a single ship escape, I will have that captain’s and his oarsmen’s heads! I want to destroy them all, you understand that? Not a single Greek ship survives!”
The commander nodded, his head low.
Xerxes looked at the top of his head and smiled. “Tomorrow, this war is won,” he said.
The orders given, the Persian commanders prepared their ships and men for battle. Night came and they slipped into the channel, their oars forming white lines of wake that were barely illuminated by the moon.
Soon after the dark had settled, the Greek traitor slipped away as well. Before midnight, he was back at the camp of Themistocles, giving his report. His reward for such bravery was worth the personal risk that he had taken, for Themistocles awarded the loyal slave not only his freedom but also great wealth.
Early in the morning, as the sun was just beginning to turn the eastern horizon gray, Themistocles walked among his battle-ready ships. The truth was, he had understood, even from the very beginning of the Persian invasion, how it would more or less unfold. He knew that Athens would eventually be taken and so had ordered its evacuation well before the battle at Thermopylae. He knew that the primary benefit of his action at Artemisium was to learn what he needed to know for a decisive confrontation at Salamis. Still, he could hardly believe his good fortune. The Persians, believing the words of his planted spy, had chosen to split their forces, an unimaginably foolish thing to do! The only advantage the Persians had was their superior numbers. Once they split their naval forces, they threw that advantage to the wind!
So it was that, as morning broke, he stood upon the beach and pictured in his mind where the Persian forces now lay. The Egyptians were far to the west and no threat to him any longer—not for a time, at least. The other Persian ships were lined up in almost single file, ready to attack through the narrow channel to the east.
The gods had given just what he had asked for, which was only a level battlefield.
The next morning, on September 20, one month after the fall of Thermopylae, the battle began.
Expecting a great victory and wanting to see it for himself, Xerxes had ordered his gold throne positioned on a high point overlooking the Salamis Channel. The sight of his powerful fleet made his heart skip a beat. Though the number of ships he still commanded had been reduced—many had been lost in previous battles or storms at sea—he still looked upon a mass of sails. Many hundreds. Maybe still a thousand! Lined up to enter the channel, his ships were packed so close together they looked like ants on a trail. And what did the Greeks have to stand against him? On the high side, his commanders had estimated the Greeks might have between three and four hundred ships. Being so outnumbered, the Greeks would be destroyed.
The Final Battle
The exact details of what happened that fateful day are not certain. One historian has said of the battle that “despite its momentous importance, Salamis must be regarded as one of the worst-documented battles in the whole history of naval warfare.”25 But the following seems to be generally agreed upon.
Xerxes ordered his fleet into the channel from the east, a narrow enough body of water that the fleet had to deploy strung out in a long line. As they entered the channel, they saw about fifty Greek ships under sail, apparently trying to escape to the west.
The Persians might have assumed that these were the last of the Greek ships. Surely the others had escaped to the west during the night and even now were being destroyed by the Egyptians!
But the truth was very different. The rest of the Greek fleet was still hidden behind the small island off Salamis.
Encouraged b
y the sight of what appeared to be the last of the fleeing Greeks, the Persians continued up the channel after them.
From behind the island, more Greek ships appeared. Perhaps these were the last of the cowards running?
The Persians entered farther into the narrow channel.
Suddenly, a third group of Greek ships emerged from behind the island. But these did not run! They struck at the flank of the Persian fleet, now well strung out. Then, as if on signal, the Greeks at the far west of the channel suddenly turned and attacked the Persians from the front.
The Persians were trapped. Unable to maneuver in the narrow channel, their ships began to run into each other. Pressed from the front and the side by the Greeks, and from the rear by their own ships, mass confusion ensued.
The Greeks quickly circled the mass of Persian ships. Working together, they attacked at will, picking them off one by one.
All of this unfolded as the mighty king of Persia watched from his throne atop the hill. It is believed that his courtiers were assigned the task of keeping track of which Persian captains fought and which ones fled.
Xerxes’ fleet included a contingent of Phoenicians, believed to be the greatest sailors of their time. Several Phoenician captains were forced to run their ships aground. Foolishly, they made their way to Xerxes, who had them beheaded on the spot.
One description of the last of the battle reads:
A vast mass of Persian ships—many of them badly crippled, with trailing spars and cordage, oars broken off short, timbers sheared or sprung by those terrible bronze-sheathed rams, went streaming away past Psyttaleia towards Phaleron. The water was thick with corpses and wreckage.26
Mercifully, the night eventually came.27
• • •
From the records, it appears that about forty Greek triremes had been destroyed, against two hundred Persian ships. Those numbers, however, did not reflect how much the Greeks had inflicted in both physical destruction and psychological damage to the Persians.
In fact, the Persian fleet was in now in dire straits. Most definitely, it was badly demoralized. The Phoenicians, humiliated by the defeat at the hands of the Greeks and angry at the treatment of their captains by Xerxes, revolted and left. The remainder of the navy attempted to repair their ships and look for replacements for lost crew members, but their hearts were never in it.
Xerxes was in a deadly predicament. He understood how badly his navy had been beaten. He also understood that September was moving on and soon it would be impossible to count on shipping safely across the Aegean Sea. Remembering how dependent he was upon the critical bridge at Hellespont, he worried that the Greeks might destroy it, leaving him with no way to retreat to Asia.
Having little option, Xerxes sent his navy home. Shortly thereafter, he followed, accompanied by a large force for his own protection, returning to his capital in Susa. He left behind the bulk of his army under the command of his cousin, instructing him to carry on the occupation of conquered Greece.
Little did he know that his conquest would be of short duration.
One year later, the Persians were defeated at the Battle of Plataea. Led by the Spartans, the Greek army mustered a unified force of perhaps seventy thousand men, the largest ever assembled in Greek history. The unity that they displayed, while unusual, was not so remarkable in light of what they had learned at Thermopylae and Salamis. Throughout the battle, they fought with the confidence of winners, while the Persians’ memory of Thermopylae and Salamis was very different.
The same day that the Persian army was defeated at Plataea, Xerxes’ navy suffered a decisive defeat at Mycale, across the Aegean Sea. The survivors of the Persian army hurried back across the Hellespont.
It would be the last Asian army to invade Europe for many centuries.28
Why It Matters
The Greeks won the great war. Some have declared that fact to be a miracle in and of itself, especially in light of the deceit of so many Greeks and Greek city-states. Many of the Greeks were cowards. Many had their loyalty easily purchased. Some have suggested that even the religious icons at Delphi, those oracles who supposedly revealed the will of the gods, had been bought off by Xerxes and told to send unusually dire or misleading messages. Political in-fighting between city-states and within the political structure continually weakened the cause.
Simply put, there is no way to paint all of the Greeks as noble and brave and full of high purpose, which makes the story even more remarkable. And it puts those true heroes of this extraordinary victory in an even more exalted light—King Leonidas and Themistocles in particular.
But it must be understood that the most important element of the Greeks’ victory had little to do with their military success. What mattered most was not the fact that a brave and freedom-loving people struggled against a tyrant and won—though that message is of great consequence. Far more important was the survival of the Greek city-states so that they could continue the development of a belief in the importance of the individual, self-government, reason, and all of the advances in the arts and sciences that came from adoption of those values.
The Persians, for all their grandeur and might, left very little to the world of lasting value. Theirs was a static society with one goal: the maintenance of an absolute, theocratic state. Had the Persians been victorious, the world would have been very different.
As one historian has said:
Against this monolithic opposition the Greek achievement stands out all the more clearly, an inexplicable miracle. We sometimes take it for granted that democratic institutions should have evolved in the city-states from Solon’s day onwards, reaching their apogee in the Persian Wars and the fifty years which followed. Nothing could be further from the predictable course of events. Free scientific enquiry, free political debate, annually appointed magistrates, decision by majority vote—all these things ran flat counter to the whole pattern of thought in any major civilisation with which the Greeks had to deal.29
When Alexander the Great and his army spread the Greek ideas of knowledge and self-government throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and to the East, they became the dominant culture of that part of the world. Later, the Romans carried the Greek culture even farther, spreading the Greeks’ love of learning and recognition of the individual and self-government to what is now Europe.
The invaluable mixture of these values, along with those of the Jewish faith and Christianity, made the Western world what it is today.
That much is indisputably true. Had the Greeks not survived, all of us living now—even though we represent but a tiny fraction of all the people who have lived upon this earth—likely would not have the fruits of freedom that we enjoy today.
Middle Eastern scholar Bernard Lewis claims that “the accessibility of Hellenistic culture, Jewish religion and Roman polity all helped to prepare the way for the rise and spread of Christianity,”30 and that
the Roman State and the Christian Churches were profoundly affected by Greek culture. Both of them contributed to its wider dissemination. . . . In their religion, too, the early Christians were concerned with philosophical subtleties of a kind that had long preoccupied the Greeks, but had never much troubled either the Romans or the Jews. The Christian scripture, the New Testament, was written in a language . . . unmistakably Greek. Even the Old Testament was available in a Greek translation, made centuries earlier in the Greek-speaking Jewish community of Alexandria.31
Such assistance, influence, and help would not have been there had Thermopylae and Salamis not happened:
We may have forgotten, that had Greece become the westernmost province of Persia, in time Greek family farms would have become estates for the Great King. . . . In place of Hellenic philosophy and science, there would have been only the subsidized arts of divination and astrology, which were the appendages of imperial or religious bureaucracies
and not governed by unfettered rational inquiry. In a Persian Greece, local councils would be mere puppet bodies . . . , history the official diaries and edicts of the Great King. . . .
. . . We would live under a much different tradition today—one where writers are under death sentences, women secluded and veiled, free speech curtailed, government in the hands of the autocrat’s extended family, universities mere centers of religious zealotry, and the thought police in our living rooms and bedrooms.32
Such were the stakes in the battles of the Persians over Greece. The development of freedom and self-government hung in the balance.
So it is that, as another essayist has said, “A little of Leonidas lies in the fact that I can go where I like and write what I like. He contributed to set us free.”33
Notes
^1. The Greek historian Herodotus, who is considered the father of history, reported many of the conversations between the former Spartan king Demaratus and the Persian king Xerxes. See Herodotus VII (translated by George Rawlinson), at http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.7.vii.html. See also Herodotus, Histories; “Herodotus,” in Cambridge History of Classical Greek Literature.
^2. Plumb, in Greeks, xxi. See also Botsford and Robinson, Hellenic History.
^3. Cowley, What If? 21.
^4. Botsford and Robinson, Hellenic History, 52, 53–54. See same for general discussion of the city-state, 52–57.
^5. See ibid., 84–98, for a discussion of the evolution of Athenian democracy.
^6. Ibid., 125.
^7. Cowley, What If? 18–19.
^8. For more information on the Persian Empire, see Curtis and Tallis, Forgotten Empire. See also the British Museum at http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk /forgottenempire/persia/later.html.
^9. Botsford and Robinson, Hellenic History, 127.