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

by Barry Strauss

  The leading hawk at court that year was Xerxes’ cousin Mardonius, the son of Gobryas and Darius’s sister. The leading dove was Xerxes’ uncle, Artabanus son of Hystaspes, a full brother of Darius. Each man spoke from experience. Uncle Artabanus had advised Darius back in 513 B.C. not to invade Scythia (roughly, today’s Ukraine), and he had been right: the invasion proved to be a disaster. Artabanus had served as a commander in Scythia. Cousin Mardonius knew Greece, having led an abortive armada there in 492 B.C., two years before Marathon; it was destroyed by a storm in the northern Aegean. In the aftermath, Darius fired Mardonius from his command.

  An ambitious man, Mardonius sought in 484 B.C. both to reverse his earlier disappointment and to win the power waiting for the first Persian governor of Greece. Most of the other courtiers shared his hard-line position. Not even the king’s eunuchs were neutral: one of them once brought Xerxes some figs from Athens for dessert, in order to remind the king of the expedition that he was supposed to lead.

  Artabanus and Mardonius each advanced powerful arguments. One man emphasized opportunity, the other, danger. One maintained the prejudice that ignorant Greeks knew nothing other than to send their armies brutally to death. The other cited Greece’s win at Marathon. One grasped the chance to crush a rising power, the other fretted about a Greek counterattack.

  Xerxes hesitated. He was a young and still relatively new king who depended on his advisers, and they were split. The Great King had so many demands on his time that it was difficult for him to be a strategist. However full his calendar, for example, he had to remember the annual festival in which he—alone in the court—danced and got drunk. He had to plant trees in the royal parks by his own hand—no doubt a symbol of fertility and prosperity. He had to know whom to honor with a seat on his right and whom on his left, who should receive a gift of a silver armchair and who a parasol bordered with precious stones, and he had to know whose good deed needed to be recorded by his secretary and whose deed could be forgotten.

  Yet after hesitating about Greece, Xerxes needed first to make a decision and then to enforce it with a sledgehammer. He needed to be the rock against Mardonius’s ambition and Artabanus’s pessimism, the lightning that could galvanize the sluggish apparatus of the Persian state. Instead, Xerxes responded with finesse. He behaved more like a politician than a commander.

  Xerxes dared not abandon his father’s war against Greece, but he dared not make war over the public opposition of Artabanus. To solve the problem, Xerxes referred to a dream. The ancients believed that dreams contained messages from the gods. Xerxes’ dream threatened ruin unless he went forward with the invasion. Artabanus backed down; in fact, he said he had the same dream himself. Like many shrewd politicians in history, Xerxes used revelation to impose consensus.

  And so in 484 B.C. the decision was made to invade Greece. But the Great King and his advisers still had to hammer out the war’s strategy and tactics. And they had to do so in the heat of the smithy rather than in the leisure of the seminar room.

  Like politics, war is the art of the possible. Not even the Great King had the luxury of choosing military strategy in a vacuum. Xerxes had to take many things into account. The king and his advisers had to engage in a net assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Greece and Persia. They had to factor in the constraints of Persian domestic politics. And before anything else, they had to define the mission’s goals.

  According to Herodotus, Xerxes told the leading Persians that he planned to burn Athens, but that would be only the beginning. His army would conquer the Peloponnese as well. In the end, they would “make the land of Persia border only on the sky that belongs to Zeus himself”; they would “make all lands into one land.” No doubt Xerxes did say something like this, as it sounds like the official Persian ideology of universal kingship. But that doesn’t mean that he believed it. He might have promised world conquest, but he aimed at conquering Greece.

  This was an ambitious but measured goal, since much of northern and central Greece already was in his hands. Darius had added Thrace and various Aegean islands to the empire and made Macedonia an ally. Xerxes had allies in Thessaly who eagerly supported his invasion plans. So Persia’s writ practically ran to a spot less than 200 miles from Athens, and Sparta lay only 135 miles beyond that. A Persian horseman could cover the distance in a few days.

  Yet those three hundred miles might prove the longest distance in the world if defended by the Greek army and navy. Persia had unrivaled wealth in money and manpower; unparalleled ability in engineering and logistics; superiority in both projectiles and cavalry; superb ships, harbors, and seafaring allies; and diplomatic and psychological capabilities of such sophistication that only a state able to muster the resources of the world’s oldest civilization could have unleashed them. But Greece had better infantry and better seamanship than Persia as well as far shorter supply lines and superior knowledge of the terrain.

  It would have made sense for Persia to respond with the force multiplier of cunning and innovative tactics. A raid on Athens’s unfortified harbor, for example, or a cavalry raid in central Greece that could destroy crops might bring friendly traitors to power in Athens. Persia could win the war at little cost.

  Generations earlier, under Cyrus the Great, Persia had excelled at just such unconventional warfare. Now, however, it was deemed beneath the dignity of the King of Kings. The commanders of the world’s greatest empire, who ruled from a ceremonial capital that sat on a 350-acre terrace at the royal city of Persepolis, liked to think big. And so, Persia resorted to the least efficient and most expensive force multiplier: numbers.

  Domestic politics may have played a role in this choice. Xerxes’ own men, no less than the enemy, needed to be impressed. What is more, they wanted jobs. “I give much to loyal men,” Xerxes had carved in stone—and he meant it. A big army offered more ways for the Great King to reward loyalty than a small strike force would have.

  The high command of the Persian army that invaded Greece, to take a case in point, was a family affair. No fewer than ten of Xerxes’ brothers and half brothers served as officers, as did at least two sons of Darius’s brothers, two sons of Darius’s sisters, one son-in-law of Darius, Xerxes’ father-in-law, and at least two other members of the extended Achaemenid clan.

  So it would be an attack in massive numbers, both by land and sea. After crossing the Hellespont, Persia’s armada amounted to 1,207 triremes in June. By mid-August, about a week before Artemisium, the Persians had added another 120 warships from allies in northern Greece, for a total of 1,327 triremes. The Greeks could not come close to matching that colossal sum. The figure of 1,207 comes from Herodotus and Aeschylus; it has often been questioned, but it does not have to be. It dovetails with the large number of ships at Lade in 494 B.C. and with Persia’s emphasis on logistics and supply in 480 B.C. Herodotus says that the triremes were followed by three thousand merchant vessels large and small, carrying food, supplies, and perhaps spare rowers.

  But the grand fleet faced big problems. The units of this multinational navy varied greatly in quality and would be hard to turn into a single fighting force. Some of Persia’s naval allies, especially the Ionians, were of dubious loyalty. Besides, so large a fleet would have trouble finding harbors.

  On land, Persia boasted magnificent cavalry, amazing archers, and supremacy in siegecraft. The ten thousand elite infantrymen whom Herodotus calls the Immortals (perhaps a mistranslation of the Persian for the Followers) were superbly trained. Unfortunately, they could not match the cohesion or heavy armor of the best Greek infantrymen. As for the cavalry, the mountainous countryside of Greece offers few opportunities for horse charges. And once the Greeks made the hard decision not to defend their cities, Persia’s sappers and rampart builders were of little worth.

  The one sure thing about the number of soldiers who marched under Xerxes is that it was very large. At a muster of the army at Doriscus in Thrace in June, the infantry consisted of forty-seven differen
t ethnic units from all over the empire. They wore everything from bronze armor to leopard skins, and they were armed with weapons ranging from spears and swords to arrows tipped with sharpened stones and to wooden clubs with iron studs. The cavalry consisted of ten different ethnic units and even included a corps of camels.

  No camels and few men ever saw any fighting, which fell almost entirely to Iranian troops, that is, Persians and their near neighbors. Most of the men were there only to show the flag and to keep their necks from the vengeance of the king’s executioner, who was sure to descend on slackers. In truth, what Xerxes held at Doriscus was less a military review than the biggest pep rally in history.

  Herodotus says that 1.7 million infantrymen and 80,000 cavalrymen mustered at Doriscus. But these figures go far beyond what ancient conditions allowed, and modern scholars have rightly whittled them down. The likeliest estimate for Xerxes’ army counts about 75,000 animals and about 200,000 men overall—150,000 combatants and 50,000 officials, slaves, eunuchs, concubines, family members, and other hangers-on.

  To turn from numbers to tactics, the Persians did not appreciate unconventional warfare, but they understood diplomacy and psychology. They knew that the Greeks did well in war only when united, so Persia’s job was to divide them. Persia had managed that before: both at Lade in 494 B.C. and earlier, in Cyprus in 497, Persian commanders talked key Greek leaders into turning traitor and then crushed the rest. The same tactic almost worked again at Marathon in 490 B.C. Thanks to turncoats within the city’s gates, the Persians nearly took Athens in spite of defeat on the battlefield.

  In short, the key to Persian victory against Greece was treason. Xerxes understood this in 480 B.C. and tried to bribe or threaten most of the Greek city-states into surrendering. It was an easy job, since few Greeks were prepared to resist.

  The intriguing possibility exists that Xerxes’ diplomats went even farther afield. The other major invasion of 480 B.C. was Carthage’s attack on the Greek cities of Sicily. Carthage, the great naval and military power located in North Africa, was originally a colony of Phoenicia, in turn Persia’s ally. Carthage’s invasion occupied the Greek city-states of Sicily and kept them from sending help to their brethren in Greece. So Xerxes had incentive to help Carthage, but later reports of Persian-Carthaginian cooperation in 480 B.C. may merely be a guess.

  What is certain is that Persia deployed the tools of psychological warfare in its buildup to invasion—and deployed those tools massively. The Persians mixed sweet talk with intimidation. For instance, they ostentatiously set up huge deposits of food for the troops at selected points on the invasion route in Thrace and Macedonia. The river Strymon in Macedonia was bridged near its mouth. In addition, Xerxes had thousands of his men undertake a gigantic engineering project in northern Greece: they dug a canal across a narrow isthmus—1.2 miles wide—on the peninsula of Mount Athos and built protective stone breakwaters at either end. It took three years to complete this project, which would allow the navy to avoid the stormy and dangerous southern tip of the Mount Athos peninsula.

  Recent archaeological excavations on the peninsula have found traces of Xerxes’ canal. The absence of any building structures, harbor installations, or marine organisms in the sediment all point to one conclusion: the canal was abandoned as soon as the ships passed through. The excavators wrote that the evidence “suggests that Xerxes built the canal as much for prestige and a show of strength as for its purely functional role.”

  Almost the same could be said for Xerxes’ bridges across the Hellespont. The Hellespont is a narrow ribbon of water, about thirty-eight miles long, separating Anatolia from the continent of Europe. Xerxes decided to bridge the waterway near its southwestern end, near the city of Abydos, where the Hellespont is only about one mile wide. Teams of Egyptian and Phoenician engineers were put in charge of the project.

  It is exhausting merely to read Herodotus’s account of the building process. On each of two bridges nearly three hundred warships (a mixture of penteconters and triremes) were anchored after having been lashed together by cables—white flax for the Phoenicians and papyrus for the Egyptians. A gap was left at two points for small boats to pass through. Walkways were laid on each bridge: these were covered by soil and fenced on either side, to keep the animals from looking down and getting frightened. Cables were attached to the land and wound tight on wooden windlasses. And all of this happened on the second try: the engineers had nearly completed two bridges when a storm blew up and destroyed them.

  After the first bridges were destroyed, Xerxes ordered the beheading of the bridge builders and the punishment of the recalcitrant waters: the Hellespont would receive three hundred lashes, a pair of fetters, and possibly even a branding with hot irons. Herodotus ridicules all this as the height of barbarian arrogance. Yet the men who were executed might have been guilty of criminal negligence, and the lashing of the Hellespont was no doubt a religious ritual.

  The real point of the bridges in the first place is open to discussion. Artabanus feared them as a target of the Greeks, who might cut them as the Scythians nearly had cut Darius’s bridge over the Danube. Nor did Persian logistics require the bridges, as their forces could have been ferried across the Hellespont. In that case, however, the public would have been deprived of the spectacle of the Persian army crossing the bridges. Herodotus reports on the ceremony on the day that the expedition began.

  At dawn, the men burned perfumed spices on the bridges and covered the roadways with myrtle branches. At sunrise, Xerxes poured an offering of wine from a golden cup into the Hellespont and asked for the sun god’s assistance. Then he threw the cup, a golden bowl, and a Persian sword into the water. The crossing took seven days and seven nights, and only the unstinting use of whips kept things moving. In that time, 200,000 men and 75,000 animals could well have crossed.

  Most commanders like to keep their army’s size and strength secret, but not Xerxes. On the contrary, when his men found Athenian spies in Anatolia, Xerxes released them and had them sent back home. Likewise, when his triremes captured a squadron of merchant ships carrying grain, bound for Greece, Xerxes did not impound them. Quipping that they were carrying grain for his men to eat when they got to Athens, he let the ships pass. Xerxes didn’t want to surprise the enemy; he wanted to overwhelm the enemy with information.

  And it looks as if Xerxes gave the same message to his own allies, if a report in a Roman-era collection of stratagems may be trusted:

  When Xerxes was campaigning against Greece he brought together many nations by dispersing agents to say that Greece’s leading men had agreed to betray their country. Since it looked less like a battle than a profit-making expedition, many of the barbarians became his allies voluntarily.

  Numbers, psychology, and politicking all combined in April 480 B.C. when the Great King’s army marched out of Sardis in procession. The support services, the pack animals, and a mass of non-Persian troops came first. Then, after a gap, came 1,000 elite cavalrymen and 1,000 elite spearmen, Persians all. Next came the holy chariot, drawn by a team of ten Nisaean horses, from a region in Iran famous for its horses. It was followed by Xerxes himself in his royal chariot, also drawn by Nisaeans. Then marched two more elite groups of cavalrymen and spearmen, each of 1,000 Persians, followed by 10,000 Persian infantry and 10,000 Persian horse. After another gap, the rest of the army followed, all mixed together. They marched one and all between the two sides of the corpse of the unfortunate son of Pythius.

  Pythius the Lydian was a local lord who had welcomed Xerxes and his forces to Anatolia in 481 B.C. Pythius offered to feed them all lavishly, at enormous cost to himself, and moreover to contribute most of his fortune to Xerxes’ war chest—and Pythius’s wealth nearly rivaled the king’s. Xerxes responded chivalrously: not only did he refuse the old man’s offer, but he actually increased the lord’s wealth with a gift from the royal treasury. More important, he made Pythius what Herodotus calls his hereditary friend—perhaps bandaka is to be unde
rstood by this. The Great King’s bandaka were his dependents or, literally, “those who wear the belt (banda) of vassalage.”

  Poor Pythius let it all go to his head. A few months afterward, at Sardis in the spring of 480 B.C., he asked Xerxes for a favor. Pythius had sent his five sons to Xerxes’ army. He had experienced second thoughts and, in order to ensure an heir, begged Xerxes to release his eldest—and favorite—son from service.

  Xerxes was furious; such defeatism on the part of the Great King’s bandaka had to be punished. In return for the earlier generosity, Xerxes would spare four of his sons, but the king ordered his servants “to find the eldest son of Pythius and to cut him in half, and having done so, to place one half on the right side of the road and the other half on the left side, and to order the army to march between them.”

  And so, at this signal of his ferocity, Xerxes unleashed the grandest military force that had ever marched and sailed. The bridges across the Hellespont, the gigantic magnitude of forces, the canal cut through the Mount Athos peninsula, the huge dumps of food along the anticipated route—these were all tools of psychological as well as physical warfare. By dividing their enemies and by terrifying them with displays of force, Persia would soften them up. The Great King’s massive number of soldiers and ships would take care of the rest.

  And that, in fact, was the flaw in the plan: the rest. If the Greeks declined to play the role of terrified natives before what amounted to Persia’s gunboats, then the Persian invasion might come crashing into walls of bronze and wood. The intriguing question is whether Xerxes was aware of the risk that he was taking.

  Herodotus describes a remarkable conversation at the Hellespont in the spring of 480 B.C. between a skeptical Artabanus and a confident Xerxes. Artabanus had earlier reminded Xerxes of the famous defeats of his dynasty: Cyrus’s loss to the Massagetae of Kazakhstan in 530 B.C., at the cost of his life; Cambyses’ failed campaign against the Ethiopians in 524, Darius’s Scythian expedition in 513, and Darius’s disappointment at Marathon in 490. The land and the sea were both Persia’s enemies, Artabanus supposedly said. The sea had no harbor big enough to shelter Xerxes’ fleet in case of storm. The land would beckon the army onward, but the further they went, the more precarious would be their supply lifeline. Artabanus also doubted the reliability of the Ionians in Persia’s fleet: no small qualm, since the Ionians were, with the Phoenicians, the best divisions in the Persian navy.