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

by Barry Strauss

  The Greek navy had to leave Artemisium in self-defense. But they also had to leave in order to protect their wives and children at home farther south. Now that Thermopylae had fallen, the road to Athens was open. The main city-state between Thermopylae and Athens was Thebes, and Thebes had joined the Persians. The Persian king had sworn to destroy Athens, and now there was nothing to stop his army razing it to the ground. Sparta had promised to send an army to protect Athens, but after Thermopylae, it could not do so. The Athenian fleet had to hurry home to carry out the emergency plan prepared in advance.

  Instead of waiting for the morning, the Greeks began to pull out that very night. After cremating their dead and manning their ships, they took care of one final detail before departure, something they dared not neglect because an oversight would have meant disaster. Every Greek, especially sailors, a group, then as now, famously superstitious, knew that they must pray to the gods for a safe journey. It was a traditional ceremony that dates as far back as Homer. The Greeks said their prayers, sang a hymn, and poured a cup of wine from the stern of each ship as an offering to the deities. Then, finally, they left Artemisium.

  Athens’s resolution in its retreat is recalled by these lines, later inscribed on a white marble pillar near the temple at Artemisium:

  With numerous tribes from Asia’s region brought

  The sons of Athens on these waters fought;

  Erecting, after they had quelled the Mede,

  To Artemis this record of the deed.

  The poet Pindar put the meaning of Artemisium succinctly:

  There the sons of Athens set

  The stone that freedom stands on yet.

  But the final word about Artemisium belongs to Themistocles. As the Greeks prepared to pull out, he ordered them to leave messages for the Persians who would shortly take over their camp. The task was entrusted to Athens’s fastest ships, in the expectation that they could catch up to the rest of the fleet. On the rocks around the several springs at the site, Themistocles had them display placards and also paint messages to the tens of thousands of Greek sailors in Xerxes’ navy. Not many of those men could read, which meant that the literate few would read the statements out loud, and the report would echo around the beach. According to Herodotus, the messages read as follows:

  Men of Ionia, you are doing wrong by making war upon your fathers and enslaving Greece. The best thing that you can do is to join us; if you cannot do this, you might at least remain neutral, and ask the Carians to do the same. If you cannot do either of these things, but are held by a force so strong that you cannot step aside, then when we get down to cases and next meet in battle, fight badly on purpose, mindful that you are descended from our ancestors and that we inherited our hatred of the barbarian from you.

  Themistocles calculated that the messages would have one of two effects: they would either lead to desertions from the Persian fleet or make the Persians distrust their Greek sailors. It was, in short, wicked propaganda. No less could be expected of a man once called the subtle serpent of the Greeks.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THERMOPYLAE

  Stripped of its helmet, Leonidas’s head is framed by its long hair. The taut skin of the warrior’s face, its color gone, stands out all the more against a short and pointed beard. The dirt of battle is probably still upon Leonidas, and there is a dark purple bruise on his chin from the pooling of what little blood is left. Ragged bits of tissue and bone hang from his severed neck, and flies and beetles have landed on his skin. If the dead king’s eyes could see, they might look all the way to Athens, the road to which now lies open for Persia.

  Leonidas son of Anaxandrides, king of Sparta, commander in chief of the Greek resistance to Persia at Thermopylae, died in a heroic last stand. After the battle, as Xerxes son of Darius, the Great King of Persia, toured the battlefield, he came upon Leonidas’s body and ordered the beheading of the corpse and the impalement of the severed head on a pole. One of those who no doubt saw Leonidas’s severed head was the former king of Sparta, Demaratus son of Ariston, now allied with the Persians.

  Three kings were present at the aftermath of the battle of Thermopylae. One sat on the greatest throne in the world, the second was deposed and exiled, and the third was dead. Yet the actions of the dead man, as explained by the exile, almost turned the ruling monarch from his appointed course and changed the entire history of the Persian invasion of Greece. Leonidas almost kept the battle of Salamis from ever happening.

  Thermopylae was the turning point. It raised the stakes of everything that would follow. Xerxes had learned how high the price of victory would be, if Persia could pay it at all.

  A humiliation for the Persians, Thermopylae had been Leonidas’s finest hour. He held off the Persians for three days. Fewer than eight thousand Greeks, spearheaded by an elite unit of three hundred Spartans, gave a savage beating to a Persian army that outnumbered them by a ratio of perhaps twenty to one. Men willing to die for the glory of the Great King came up against the most efficient killing machine in history.

  On one side had stood the Spartan soldier. With his bronze helmet, breastplate, and greaves, each Spartan seemed to be sheathed in metal. There was bronze, too, in the plating of his shield, which was large, circular, and convex in shape. A crimson-colored, sleeveless wool tunic extended from shoulders to midthigh. The braids of his long hair ran out from under his helmet, while a horsehair plume swayed above it. The long hair, a Spartan trademark, was meant to look fearsome. Each Spartan was barefoot, itself a symbol of toughness, and carried a short iron sword and a long pike. The latter, which was his main weapon, was an ash-wood spear, about nine feet long, with an iron spearhead and a bronze butt-spike. Arranged in close order in the phalanx, shields interlocking, the Spartans thrust at the enemy with their pikes.

  On the other side there had stood the Persian and Median infantrymen, soldiers of the two leading peoples of Iran. By comparison with the Spartans, they looked as if they were dressed for the parade ground rather than the battlefield. Each Iranian wore a brightly colored, sleeved, knee-length tunic, under which an iron-scaled breastplate protected the torso, but he had neither helmet nor greaves. He wore a felt hat or a turban on his head, while his lower body was covered either by a long draped robe or a pair of trousers. He wore gold jewelry, even into battle. His feet were protected by shoes. His shield was smaller than a Greek’s and made of wicker rather than of wood and bronze plating. The Persian spear was much shorter than the Greek pike, which put the Iranians at a disadvantage against an enemy with a longer reach. Nor could the dagger carried by an Iranian outreach the Spartan sword. Unlike the Greek infantryman, the typical Iranian soldier carried a quiver full of cane arrows with bronze or iron points and a bow with its ends shaped like animal heads. Yet Persian arrows could do little damage against a wall of Greek shields or a rapid charge by bronze-covered infantrymen. No wonder that a Spartan at Thermopylae is said to have quipped that he did not mind if the Persians’ barrage of arrows was so thick that it blocked out the sun, since he preferred to fight in the shade.

  But equipment was only part of the story. Thermopylae was a triumph of Greek military science over Persian blundering. Leonidas chose his terrain wisely and his tactics logically. He reasoned that in the narrows of Thermopylae—at one point, only fifty feet wide—a small number of men could hold off the Persians. Wave after wave of Persians could attack, but each would break on the long spears and the rugged training of the Greek infantrymen.

  The Spartans had the only full-time army in Greece. Their training exceeded anything that the Great King’s men—or the other Greeks—had undergone. With the exception of the kings, every Spartan citizen was schooled in a rigid, military education called, simply, “The Upbringing.” Only trained and hardened Spartans could have carried out a maneuver like this at Thermopylae: turning and retreating in an orderly way and then, once they had tricked the Persians into charging them with a roar, changing course in an instantaneous wheel and crushin
g the enemy.

  For two days the slaughter continued. Then, on the third day, the Persians outflanked the Greeks by taking a path over the mountains. Once again as in the past, Greek treason saved the Persians. At Thermopylae, the Greek traitor was a native of the region, Ephialtes son of Eurydemus of Trachis. In exchange for money, he guided Xerxes’ elite soldiers over the steep, narrow, and hard-to-follow mountain track.

  Alerted by scouts to the Persians’ movement, Leonidas dismissed most of the allied troops before the enemy could close off the far end of the pass. About a thousand other Greeks remained with the Spartans. Leonidas’s strategy is unclear. Perhaps he planned to have his men guard the rear and then escape at the last moment but in the end failed to do so, or perhaps he planned all along for them to stand and fight to the death. In any case, when the Persians attacked, the Greeks first fought with their spears, and when their spears were all broken, they used their swords. When their swords were gone, they went after the Persians with hands and teeth. When Leonidas finally fell, the Greeks drove the enemy off four times before recovering his body. Before the Greeks were at last overwhelmed by Persian spears and arrows, they killed two of Xerxes’ half brothers, Abrocomes and Hyperanthes.

  Xerxes’ men cleared the pass in the end, but the image of Leonidas’s head loomed over it. In the pitiless Greek light of high summer it was a reminder of Persian weakness. Since the Persians normally took pride in treating their enemies with respect, they would not have insulted the body of a fallen foe like Leonidas unless he had enraged them by the force of his resistance. Leonidas’s head was a reminder that the butcher’s bill for killing four thousand Greeks (the others escaped) was twenty thousand Persians. Any more such victories and the Persians were ruined.

  The Great King had hoped to win the war in central Greece. His army and navy would overwhelm the Greeks through Persian numbers and Greek defections. But the navy was defeated by a combination of Greek boldness, Persian strategic errors, and the very size of the fleet, which rendered it too big to find a harbor in a storm. The Persian army fared better, but only at a steep cost. Xerxes’ war was not going according to plan.

  The Great King of Persia had crossed the Hellespont into Europe with his army three months before, in May. For almost the whole time since, Xerxes’ expedition had been less a war than a gigantic picnic. City after city had feted him and his men at its own expense.

  Xerxes had marched his army through the northern regions of Greece in Thrace and Macedonia and past Mount Olympus into Thessaly. He marched them into central Greece, through Phthia, the legendary homeland of Achilles, and into Malis, where myth had Heracles spend his last years. Meanwhile, the Persian fleet sailed nearby, along the coast. The army stopped at the pass of Thermopylae, which it found blocked by the Greeks. The navy stopped about fifty miles to the north, at Aphetae, opposite the Greek fleet at Artemisium.

  And then the war came. Xerxes should have relished the moment, because he had spent four years preparing for it. But he could not have foreseen the week in August that he had just endured. During that terrible week, his navy had not only failed in its plan to destroy the Greek fleet, but it had lost two hundred ships in a storm off the island of Euboea and perhaps seventy more in battle. Add the loss of four hundred ships in another storm off Cape Sepias on the Greek mainland the week before, and the Persian fleet was reduced to about half its original size. Meanwhile, at Thermopylae, Xerxes’ army had been pummeled by a paltry force of Greek infantrymen—and before his very eyes. He had to concede that when it came to soldiers he had “many people but few men.” Or so Herodotus says, but kings do not give up illusions easily.

  That the Great King led the invasion of Greece in person was no surprise. Xerxes might have put on airs like a pharaoh, but he was a Persian and Persians made war. He advertised heroism in his very name: Xerxes is Greek for the Persian Khsha-yar-shan, the king’s throne name, which means “ruler of heroes.” Tall and handsome, Xerxes looked like a king. And he followed in the footsteps of Cyrus the Great, founder in 550 B.C. of the Achaemenid Empire (named for Achaemenes, the semilegendary founder of Cyrus’s clan). Every king since Cyrus had led an invasion, and every king had conquered new territory.

  Xerxes struck a chord in the Persian soul when he declared in an inscription: “I am skilled both in hands and in feet. A horseman, I am a good horseman. A bowman, I am a good bowman, both on foot and on horseback. A spearman, I am a good spearman, both on foot and on horseback.”

  At Thermopylae, Xerxes had stayed close enough to the fighting to inspire the men but far enough away to limit his danger. Surrounded by royal guards, he sat on a high-backed throne, where he is said to have jumped to his feet three times in horror at the mauling inflicted on his troops. Not that Xerxes’ position was risk free. The Greeks claimed afterward to have sent raiders into the Persian camp at night who penetrated even the royal tent before they were repelled. The story is so improbable that it might even be true. In any case, it highlights the risks that real leaders take.

  The road to Thermopylae had started in eastern Anatolia a year before. There in 481 B.C., Xerxes had mustered the troops from Iran and the eastern provinces and begun the long march westward. They reached Sardis in the fall and after wintering there, left in April 480 B.C. But preparations for the war—the immense organization of men and arms, ships and supplies, the building of bridges and the carving of canals—had already been going on for three years. Indeed, the war had been on the horizon even before November 486 B.C., when Xerxes succeeded to the throne of his father, Darius. At the time of his death, the sixty-five-year-old Darius had been gearing up for an invasion of Greece in order to avenge Persia’s defeat at Marathon in 490 B.C. The new king, probably thirty two years old, would have to decide both whether to fight and what kind of war to wage.

  Xerxes ruled what was, without exaggeration, the greatest empire in the history of the world to that date. His domain extended from what is today Pakistan in the east, westward through central and western Asia to Macedonia in the north, and across the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in the south. It took roughly four thousand miles of roads to travel from one end of the empire to the other. The empire covered nearly 3 million square miles and contained perhaps as many as 20 million people, which makes it about as big as the continental United States of America. Yet with an estimated total world population in 500 B.C. of only about 100 million, Xerxes’ empire held perhaps one-fifth of the people on the planet.

  The immense majesty of the Persian peace brought order and prosperity to a huge range of peoples and cultures. Outstanding administrators and builders, the Persians built roads and palaces, inns and even parks—known in Greek as paradeisoi, from which comes our word paradise. They established provincial governments and codified the law. They created the world’s first large-scale coinage, which proved convenient for collecting the tribute (taxes) that they imposed on the various provinces.

  Xerxes was born to this stupendous heritage probably in 518 B.C. He was both the son of Darius and, through his mother, Atossa, the grandson of Cyrus the Great. To be an heir of someone like Darius was a blessing and a curse. Darius was a self-made man who took power in a coup d’état: he went on to become a mighty conqueror, a brilliant administrator, a religious visionary, and an architectural genius. In fact, Darius was one of the greatest kings in the long history of the Near East. Darius had ruled as Great King for thirty-six years when he died.

  The Persians set great store on the impression made by their king and did not leave matters to chance. Royal infants were fussed over by eunuchs, while adult kings were tended by hairdressers, makeup artists, and perfumers—the latter following the king even on military campaigns. Monarchs kept their looks by coating themselves with an ointment consisting of ground-up sunflower seeds mixed with saffron, palm wine, and fat from one of the rare lions to be found in Persian territory. The king always had a mustache and long beard; should nature fail him, toupees and false beards and mustaches were all avai
lable. In order to maintain his dignity, in public the king never spat, blew his nose, or turned to look behind him.

  On formal occasions, Xerxes probably dressed like one of his successors, who wore a long purple robe, “interwoven with white at the center, and his gold-embroidered cloak bore a gilded motif of hawks attacking each other with their beaks.” Other descriptions mention gold-embroidered files of lions on the royal robe. The king’s sword, its scabbard encrusted with precious stones, was slung from his gilded belt. He wore a royal tiara encircled by a white-flecked blue ribbon.

  Yet it was easier to look like a king than to be one. Xerxes faced the formidable task of confirming himself a worthy son of Darius. Few things could better earn Xerxes respect than avenging his father against the Greeks. “This is indeed my capability: that my body is strong. As a fighter of battles I am a good fighter of battles.” So Xerxes proclaimed in an inscription. But he would have to prove it.

  And he would have to wait. Egypt rose in revolt in the last months of Darius’s life and it fell to Xerxes to suppress the uprising. In 485 B.C., Xerxes went in person to Egypt to lead an army against the rebels. This, his first campaign, was a decisive victory, and by January 484, Egypt was once again a loyal Persian province. There was trouble in Babylon, too, around the same time (the precise year is unclear), but it was easily crushed by troops under a general sent by Xerxes. In 484, with Egypt back in the fold, the Great King returned to the question of Greece. And a complex question the Greek war was. There was pressure on Xerxes from many sides to launch an invasion, yet there were good reasons to hold back.