The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece -- and Western Civilization

by Barry Strauss

  Before deciding on their next move, the Greeks went through a long and barely decisive debate. They finally agreed to launch their ships at midnight to meet the Persian contingent of two hundred ships. Presumably they planned to sail southward and attack the ships in isolation. That was a bad idea because it would have drawn the main Persian fleet out after them, and fortunately, the Greeks never followed through. By the afternoon, with no sign of the two hundred Persian ships, the Greeks changed their minds. They would attack the main body of the Persian fleet.

  It was a crazy plan, or so it seemed. Ancient navies rarely chose to fight without a friendly shore nearby, but the Greek fleet had purposely left its base at Artemisium to head across the channel. The Greeks, moreover, had 271 warships, the Persians over 700, plus the menacing 200 ships from the south. On top of that, Persian triremes were faster than Greek triremes.

  Supreme in numbers and speed, the Persians could hardly believe their eyes when they saw the Greeks bearing down on them. The Persians quickly manned their ships to meet the attack. The Persian crews were confident of success, and they competed for the honor of being the first to capture an enemy ship, especially a ship from the best Greek contingent, the Athenians. The Ionian Greeks in the Persian fleet pitied their fellow Greeks on the other side. The way the Ionians saw it, not a single man in the Greek navy would make it home.

  The Greek attack was as crazy as it was cunning and calculated and courageous. It bears the hallmark of that master tactician Themistocles. The Athenian single-handedly overcame all opposition and talked the Greeks into taking the offensive. Who else could have conceived such a brilliant use of timing, precision, and shock?

  Themistocles carefully planned the attack for the evening. Ancient navies reluctantly traveled in the dark, but they dared not fight in the dark, so the engagement would be brief. It would, in fact, be less of a battle than a raid, and indeed, an experiment. Under carefully controlled conditions, the Greeks would be able to test the enemy’s battle skills, particularly at the maneuver known as the diekplous.

  Diekplous means “rowing through and out.” In this dangerous maneuver, a single trireme or, preferably, a line of triremes rowed through a gap in the enemy line and attacked. The decks would be lined with soldiers and archers at the ready, but their role was mainly defensive. The main weapon was the attacking ship’s ram: it was used to smash into the quarter (the stern part) of the enemy trireme. The Phoenicians were especially good at this maneuver, as an ancient source notes:

  When the Phoenicians are lined up opposite the enemy face-to-face, in line abreast, they bear down as if to ram head-on, but instead of doing so they row through the enemy’s line and turn and attack the exposed sides of the enemy ships.

  Another tactic in the diekplous was to shear off the oars of one side of an enemy trireme, thereby crippling it. The inertial force would wound or possibly kill rowers on the enemy vessel. Meanwhile, the rowers of the attacking ship had to pull in their own oars at the crucial last minute in order to keep from damaging them.

  The diekplous was a deadly dance and as complex as any ballet. The Greek fleet needed to stop the enemy’s dance and to answer it with a maneuver of its own. Success came only with experience, and few rowers in the Athenian fleet had ever executed maneuvers in battle. They had no doubt practiced during the two summers since the building of Athens’s new fleet, but those were only rehearsals. Nor had the entire Greek fleet fought together before. That first evening at Artemisium marked the debut of the Greek fleet—and it was brilliant.

  Just before launching their ships, the Greeks no doubt took care of the customary pre-battle rituals. The priests who took part in every city-state’s forces—just as chaplains accompany modern armies—sacrificed animals in order to gain the gods’ approval. Then, as they launched their ships and rowed toward the enemy, the trumpets sounded, and some if not all of the crews bucked up their spirits by singing a battle hymn, or, as the Greeks called it, a paean.

  A well-rowed and carefully coordinated fleet would have made a stunning impression. Themistocles was in the thick of things. Ancient generals did not lead from the rear. As an Athenian commander, Themistocles would have directed the attack from a well-marked flagship, perhaps flying a purple flag at the stern. He would have sat in a raised position on the quarterdeck, from which he could follow events and issue orders. But it was a vulnerable position: in a battle at a later date, for example, a Spartan general was thrown from the deck when his ship was rammed, and he drowned.

  It was the general’s responsibility to make a battle plan and then to see that his ships carried it out. He had to see to it that the ships stayed in line. A general gave the orders to advance and to retreat, to spread out or to pull into a more compact formation. If the enemy behavior proved to be different from what had been expected, it was up to the general to change battle plans and to inform his lieutenants to spread the word.

  As surprised by the Greek attack as they were contemptuous of it, the Persians, a superior force, did the obvious thing: they surrounded the enemy. With their huge numbers and a channel ten miles wide, they could easily outflank the Greek line. In fact, as Herodotus reports, the Persians actually encircled the Greeks. But they had played right into Themistocles’ hands.

  The Greek commanders ordered a prearranged signal. Signaling at sea was often done by flashing sunlight off a burnished shield; a mirror or even a cutlass could be used as well. If the sun was too low at this late hour, and if the light was wrong for waving a white or scarlet linen flag—another means of signaling—then the signal was probably called by the sound of trumpets rising above the din.

  At the signal, the Greeks followed their plan and arranged their boats in a defensive circle. They might have carried out the maneuver by having each of the two wings of their line back water, that is, to continue to force the enemy but row backwards, stern first; meanwhile the center maintained its position. Now every boat faced prow out, with the sterns drawn close together. The ring was too tight for the Persians to penetrate. Meanwhile, the self-assured Persians probably felt no need to keep their ships in so strict an order.

  The ships of the two fleets could hardly have been closer to each other; they stood prow to prow or, to use the ancient Greek expression, mouth to mouth. To put it differently, the two fleets would fight in an artificially created narrow space. Themistocles had maneuvered the enemy precisely where he wanted it, where Athens’s heavier ships could do the most damage. We can only speculate as to whether Themistocles had also chosen a moment when the wind was favorable.

  On deck, the soldiers and archers kept at the ready, careful not to shift position and unbalance the boat. The pilot loosely held the two rudder oars, waiting for a call to action. Meanwhile, below deck, the rowers, arranged on three levels, sat silently on their benches, ears pricked for the piper, whose rhythm their strokes would soon follow.

  The rowers sitting on the top level might catch glimpses of the scene outside by peering between the ship’s wooden posts and the horsehair screens set up for the battle to protect them from enemy arrows. The lower two levels of rowers could only imagine what lay outside. As they headed for an appointment with death, their world consisted only of the 170 men within the wooden walls. It was a world permeated by the odors of pine, from the resin pitch used to protect the hold from seawater, and of mutton, from the sheep tallow used to lubricate the leather sleeves through which the oars passed. And everywhere was the smell of sweat and flatulence and occasionally of vomit.

  Now came Themistocles’ coup. At a second signal, selected Greek triremes darted out of the circle, went through the loose enemy line, picked off vulnerable Persian triremes, and escaped. The preferred Greek tactics were either to ram a Persian vessel and then back off or to shear off the enemy’s oars on one side and then turn and flee. In either case, this superbly executed countermaneuver stopped the enemy’s diekplous and yielded the Greeks thirty enemy vessels as well as another important captive, a notab
le man in the Persian forces named Philaon son of Chersis, the brother of King Gorgus, king of the city of Salamis in Cyprus (a different place from Athens’s island of Salamis). An Athenian captain, one Lycomedes son of Aeschraeus of the deme of Phyla, won the prize for bravery because he was the first Greek to capture a Persian warship. A Greek ship in Persian service, captained by Antidorus of the island of Lemnos, defected to the Greek side. Two years of hard training had paid off for the Athenians. The Persians probably never knew what hit them.

  The dispirited Persians headed back to their base at Aphetae, but their troubles were not over. That night saw a loud and violent thunderstorm, unseasonable in the Greek summer. The weather played havoc with Persian morale, as Herodotus reports:

  Corpses and the wreckage of the ships were carried to Aphetae, where they clustered around the prows of the ships and got in the way of the blades of the oars. The crews grew frightened when they heard about this, and they expected that they were going to die, given all the troubles they had encountered.

  The morning brought worse news. The same rainstorm that frightened the men at Aphetae had also wrecked the two-hundred-ship Persian contingent that had been sent around Euboea’s east coast. Survivors hurried back to Aphetae with the news. There would be no entrapment of the Greeks at Artemisium.

  As if to drive the point home, the Greeks attacked the Persians again that very afternoon, waiting once more until the hour was late. Greek spirits were buoyed by the news of Persia’s disaster around Euboea and by the arrival of fifty-three triremes from Athens as reinforcements. Information is scanty about the second engagement off Artemisium, but we may speculate that the Greeks pounced on a Persian squadron rather than the whole fleet. At any rate, the Greeks destroyed some ships from Cilicia (a region in southern Anatolia) and then sailed back to Artemisium.

  Finally, on the third day, Persia’s frustrated commanders initiated their own attack. By now they were worried about soon having to face the anger of their absent king, who was off directing the fighting at Thermopylae but would hear the news from Artemisium. They sailed out around midday. The commanders exhorted their men: “Destroy the Greek fleet and gain control of the waterway!”

  As the Persians rowed across in battle order, the Greeks kept calm, embarked on their ships, and kept close to Artemisium. Their generals too exhorted their men: “The barbarians shall not pass into the heart of Greece!”

  The Persians arranged their ships in a semicircle, hoping to surround the Greeks and crush them. But it did not work out. We do not know precisely how they did it, but somehow the outnumbered Greeks once again made their quality equal the quantity of the enemy. Maybe the battle took place at the entrance to the bay where the Greek triremes were moored; a narrow space that worked to the advantage of the heavy Athenian vessels. Maybe the Greeks arranged their ships in a double line as a defense against the enemy’s diekplous. The ships in the second line would try to pick off any Persian ship that broke through before it could turn and ram a Greek ship in the front line. We know that a man named Heraclides of Mylasa, a refugee from Persian rule, used precisely this tactic against Phoenician ships in a battle of Artemisium. But Artemisium was a common name, and we do not know if the anecdote about Heraclides refers to this battle.

  However they did it, the Greeks managed to put the enemy off balance. Instead of helping, Persia’s superiority in number of ships hurt. The ships of the enormous fleet kept falling afoul of themselves, as boats could not avoid colliding with one another.

  Still, the Persians refused to yield. They were too proud to let so small a fleet make them turn tail. The battle continued until nightfall, when both sides were bruised enough to be eager to end it. Herodotus reports that both sides lost many ships and men. But there was bad news for Persia even so. Their losses far outnumbered the Greeks’.

  Tactically, the battle of the third day was a draw, but in terms of strategy, it was a Greek victory. At Artemisium, Persia had hoped to knock the Greek fleet out of the war. Yet the Greek fleet had not just survived the worst Persia had to offer but had actually won two out of the three engagements. It was a blow to Persia’s naval pride.

  There would be a rematch between the two fleets, of course, but that would take place further south, near Athens or the Peloponnese. There, the Greeks would have the great advantage of familiar waters. The Persians, meanwhile, would be ever further from their base, ever deeper in hostile territory, ever more troubled by the food supply.

  And as important as the battles off Artemisium were, they took second place to the storms that had buffeted the Persian fleet. The Persians had left northern Greece with 1,327 triremes. They suffered the staggering loss of 600 ships to storms; add battle losses, and the Persians probably had only about 650 ships left after Artemisium. As Herodotus commented on the storm that wrecked 200 Persian ships off Euboea, “it was all done by the god so that the Greek force would be saved and the Persian force would be not be much greater than it.” True, the Persians still outnumbered the Greeks, but the unreliability of some of Persia’s squadrons further reduced their numerical advantage.

  Back at Artemisium and at Aphetae, prizes were awarded for valor in battle. Xerxes gave the honors to his Egyptian sailors for capturing five Greek ships, crews and all. That is, according to Herodotus: another tradition says that the Phoenicians of the city of Sidon took Persian honors for Artemisium. The five ships under Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus also fought in the thick of battle. On the Greek side, Athens won the prize, and among the Athenians, the pride of place belonged to Cleinias son of Alcibiades, a wealthy aristocrat who provided two hundred sailors and his own trireme, all at his own expense. But there was little time for celebration. There was work to do: both sides had to collect their corpses and salvage what they could of their wrecks. The Athenians had suffered damage to fully half of their triremes.

  But Themistocles was already looking ahead. He called together the Greek generals and told them that he had a plan. He thought that he might be able to detach the Ionians and the Carians from the enemy, and said that they were the best units in the Persian fleet. (The Phoenicians, for one, would not have agreed.)

  Without a doubt, many Ionian Greeks and many Carians had reason to hate Persia. For example, they knew how Persia had treated the people of Miletus after the Ionian Revolt. Most of the men were killed, the women and children were made slaves, and those men who were captured alive were eventually resettled on the Persian Gulf.

  Or take the islanders of Chios, whose experience at the naval battle of Lade in 494 B.C. was an epic in miniature. One hundred Chian ships took part in the fight. Although most of the Greek ships fled at the start, the Chians fought hard and captured a number of Persian ships. Finally, however, the badly outnumbered Chians lost most of their own ships, and the survivors fled for home.

  But some of Chios’s ships had been damaged, and the enemy ran them aground on the mainland. From there, the crews made their way on foot to the territory of Ephesus, a Greek city. By now it was dark. As it happened, the women of Ephesus were gathered outside the city to celebrate a festival. The men of Ephesus, terrified by the sudden appearance of a group of armed strangers, attacked the Chians and slaughtered them to the last man. Such was the tragic end of their struggle for freedom.

  The Ionians remembered this, and they remembered something else, too: Persia won the battle of Lade by diplomacy, not skill at sea. The main Greek contingent, which came from the island of Samos, agreed to desert, and that threw the battle to Persia. In other words, the Persian fleet had not proven itself to be supreme in battle.

  Aware of all this, the Greeks at Artemisium were no doubt intrigued by Themistocles’ promise of getting the Ionians and Carians to desert. They asked him how he would manage it. That, said Themistocles, was a secret for the moment. It would be revealed in good time. For now, let the details be left to him. Also, he asked for the authority to choose the moment when the fleet would make the prudent retreat homeward that was n
ow obviously necessary.

  Never docile, Themistocles’ colleagues nonetheless agreed. Perhaps they were persuaded by his arguments, or perhaps they reasoned that he would make a convenient scapegoat should things go wrong. Or maybe the issue was decided by the distraction with which Themistocles tempted them: food.

  He advised the generals to order the men to light watch fires and to slaughter the sheep and goats that the Euboean locals had incautiously driven nearby at day’s end. Sheep-stealing in Greece is as old as the Odyssey, but the generals nonetheless felt the need to justify their act; if they hadn’t grabbed the beasts, they reasoned, the Persians would have. Lamb and goat were a treat, compared to the usual fare of barley groats, salt fish, garlic, and onions. But then, many of the men had just had the hardest three days of their lives. Most of them had never before experienced hearing the roar of charging warships or seeing pale corpses slip beneath the waves.

  That night, while meat crackled on wooden spits along the shore, the scene might have looked from a distance like one of those all-night festivals under the stars that the Greeks so loved. The constellations of the Bear and the Archer (as the Greeks referred to them; we call them the Big Dipper and Sagittarius) were low and prominent in the summer sky, and the shore was lit by thousands of fires. But close up, among the exhausted men, it was no scene of celebration. The word was out: the navy would be pulling out the next morning. Themistocles had chosen his moment. Then came the news from Thermopylae. The Persians had broken through the pass and slaughtered the Spartans, including the Spartan king.