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

by Barry Strauss

  Meanwhile on Salamis the Greek fleet got under way. As was customary, the right wing, here headed by the Spartans under Eurybiades, led the advance. Aeschylus writes:

  First the right wing in a good arrangement

  Leads in order, and second the whole fleet

  Advances.

  But where did they advance to? Herodotus offers clues, and the rest may be surmised from the ancient way of war. Triremes were, as the poet says, “bronze-rammed floating chariots.” The key to trireme battle was maximizing the chance to ram the enemy while minimizing his opportunity to ram back. Under perfect conditions, an attacker would approach a victim from the victim’s stern, to protect himself from the ram at his victim’s bow. Bow-to-bow ramming became feasible only after first strengthening the bow timbers of one’s ship, a tactic invented by Corinthians in 413 B.C. Since an enemy would not voluntarily present the sides of his triremes, ramming usually meant having to maneuver around or through an enemy fleet. The attacker would then ram his victim in the victim’s quarter, that is, the stern portion of the ship. In that position, the attacker’s own oars would be clear of the rammed ship, and he could back away quickly and easily. Furthermore, by attacking at a narrow angle, the attacker minimized the danger of wrenching his own ram off sideways.

  But conditions are rarely perfect, and the attacker sometimes had to ram the enemy amidships. And sometimes he might risk coming at the enemy’s bow and then quickly turning to ram. In that case, the attacking pilot might try to use his ram to hit the oars of the other trireme and break them against the stem of his own ship, after having his own crew pull in their oars. This was a difficult maneuver but probably deadly to the enemy rowers, whom it knocked about.

  The basic tactic at the start of battle was to arrange one’s ships in line abreast while, at the same time, keeping gaps from opening between ships and also protecting one’s flanks. The smaller and slower a fleet, the more important it was to cover the flanks, and the Greeks were outnumbered by an enemy with lighter, faster, and more agile ships.

  When they came out of their narrow-mouthed harbors, the Greeks rowed first in single file and then deployed in line abreast. Leading the ships out from Ambelaki Bay, the Spartans anchored the right end of the Greek line near the tip of the Cynosura peninsula. The Athenians, who were probably in Paloukia Bay, anchored the left end of the Greek line either at Cape Trophy (the modern name), which is the tip of the Kamateró peninsula, or at the southeastern end of the islet of St. George. In either case, the Greek line enjoyed the advantages of land bastions at both ends and a friendly shore at its rear.

  The channel to the north and east of St. George was all but closed off. Today, a reef sits to the east of St. George, between that islet and the mainland of Attica. But in antiquity the sea level in the straits was at least five feet lower than it is today. The reef, therefore, was itself an islet in 480 B.C. The islet-reef and St. George are probably the little archipelago that the ancients called the Pharmacussae Islands. The distance between the two was perhaps as little as six hundred yards, too narrow for either fleet to risk entrapment.

  Extending between Cynosura and either Cape Trophy or St. George, the Greek line was between two and two and a half miles long. It was too short for the Greeks to deploy all their triremes in a single line, but it was perfect for two lines, the formation that the Greeks might also have used on the last day at Artemisium. The triremes in the rear line could stand ready to counterattack any Persian ships that tried to pass through the front line and ram Greek triremes there.

  The Athenians held the left end of the Greek line; the Spartans held the right. The Aeginetans probably stood next to the Athenians. The other Greeks were deployed in between, although we do not know where. If the Corinthians had indeed sailed northward to incite false confidence among the Persians, they surely quickly returned to the Greek line, in a position near the left end.

  The Persians deployed their ships in battle order in line abreast along the Attic coast, where their infantrymen held the shore. Since the Greeks’ flanks were protected by the terrain, the Persians could not outflank them. So they probably arranged their ships opposite the Greeks in two or three lines, depending on how much of the Persian fleet had entered the straits by dawn. The Phoenicians held the right end of the Persian line, opposite the Athenians and Aeginetans. The Ionians (and perhaps other Greeks) held the left end. We do not know where the other contingents in the Persian fleet were stationed, nor is it clear which contingents were stationed outside the straits.

  The Greeks had launched their ships and the Persians had rowed out to meet them. The fleets came close enough to each other for them each to hear the trill of the other’s pipers, keeping time for the oarsmen. The aulos, or Greek pipe (sometimes mistakenly called a flute), was a cylinder with finger holes, sounded with a reed. Normally pipes were played in pairs, one pipe fingered by each hand. A cloth band around the player’s head and face was used to support the cheeks. The sound of the pipe was so stirring that Greek conservatives thundered against it because it might lead youths astray. For the same reason, the pipe proved invaluable in focusing the minds of the oarsmen on the trireme. It served as both a metronome and distraction from the awfulness of what lay ahead.

  Perhaps it was now that the Persians heard what Aeschylus calls “a mighty battle cry” from the Greek ships:

  O sons of the Greeks, advance:

  Liberate the fatherland, liberate

  Your children, your women, and the abodes

  Of your ancestral gods and the graves

  Of your ancestors. Now is the battle for them all!

  And the Persians answered in turn with what—to the Greeks—sounded like “the noise of the Persian tongue.”

  It was a historic moment. For centuries, Phoenicia had been the eastern Mediterranean’s greatest sea power. Now, a Greek upstart, a city with a newfangled system of government—democracy—and a brand-new fleet, challenged that supremacy.

  The two fleets confronted each other, yet the battle did not begin at once. The Greeks flinched first. Or so it seems: at any rate, their ships begin to back water, that is, they continued to face the enemy but rowed backward, stern first, toward the shore of Salamis. If this was panic, it was not panic on the part of the rowers. Below deck, most of the rowers could see nothing. The decision to back water came from the generals and was transmitted to captains and helmsmen by a prearranged signal.

  Seen from above, which was Xerxes’ perspective, the opening stage of the battle might have looked like a standoff between two schools of fish. The swordfishlike Phoenician triremes, with their long narrow rams, pursued the hammerhead-shark-like Greek vessels, with their short and stubby rams. The sharks seemed to have lost their nerve.

  But the Greeks probably knew just what they were doing. We may imagine that gaps had opened up in the long Greek line; by backing water, the ships were able to close ranks. They also drew the Persians close enough to Salamis to put them in range of Athenian archers on shore: protected by their shields from Persian archers, the Athenians could attack the enemy on deck or wait for Persian survivors of wrecked ships to take to the water. Still another reason for the Greek decision to back water might have been the desire to wait as long as possible for the aura to blow.

  But the plan did not work out that way. As often in the history of battle, the first blood was shed not on a general’s order but at the initiative of a subordinate who had grown tired of waiting.

  On the western end of the Greek line, an Athenian captain, one Aminias of the deme of Pallene, put his ship out to sea again and rammed a Phoenician trireme. He may have seen that some Greek ships had backed too far, since they actually ran aground. He might have taken this as a sign of the jitters and might have worried that the Persians would seize the moment. And so Aminias took matters into his own hands.

  Who was this man who lit the spark of battle? Assuming that Aminias fit the usual Athenian mold of a captain, he was a man of substance but no
t of advanced age. He owned land and a house in Attica, had legitimate children, and was less than fifty years old. Since Athenian men tended to marry around the age of thirty, Aminias was likely in his thirties or forties. He was also wealthy, since captains had to pay their own crews. Since Pallene, his home, was a farming district in central Attica, Aminias probably owed his wealth to olives, grapes, figs, and grain. We may imagine him as fit and tough, as farmers often are, and we know that he had guts. A captain as courageous as Aminias surely had men loyal enough to follow him anywhere. But it no doubt helped that most of his rowers probably came from Pallene and many would have known each other their entire lives. Trust came easily to such a crew.

  It had to, because ramming was a group effort. When Aminias decided to break out of the line and ram an enemy ship, he had to pass the order on to his helmsman, and he in turn to the rowing master, who then had to inform the crew. The marines and archers on deck had to brace themselves for impact by sitting firmly, but it was on the oarsmen’s shoulders that the main burden fell. They would have to power up the boat rapidly from a standing start—or even worse, from backing water—to ramming speed.

  It would not take long from the moment that Aminias gave the order to the point of impact. Athens’s heavy ships could not achieve the speed of a fast trireme, which, tests suggest, could accelerate from a standing start to nine or ten knots within about sixty seconds. But Aminias’s trireme did not have to go nearly that fast. The Phoenician ships were either standing still or moving toward the Athenian ships, so the Athenian attacker did not have to outrun the enemy. Aminias merely had to go fast enough to penetrate the planks of a Phoenician ship. Depending on whether Aminias’s trireme struck its victim amidships or in the quarter, a speed of two to four knots would have been sufficient.

  Once the captain ordered the attack and the pilot passed the word on, the rowing master would rapidly move the crew up to a high stroke rate, perhaps approaching fifty strokes per minute. At that pace, every rower had to devote all his attention to the task at hand. For no more than a minute it might seem to him as if nothing existed except a narrow, stinking tunnel of 170 men bent over in unison, as if rowing a single oar. Still, the mind might wander to home and happy times, to games and feasts, to anything except the split-second shock of collision. Muscles strained and lungs sucked in air; it seemed as if the agony would never end. And then suddenly, just before the moment of impact, the rowing master, primed by the pilot, ordered the men to switch to backing water, in order to keep the ram from penetrating the enemy ship too far. Then the crash came, and if all went well, the vulnerable attacker would already have begun backing off. Although working at extreme intensity, the men would have to work harder still, rowing the ship in the opposite direction from before.

  Aminias’s crew had slammed into a Phoenician trireme and given their captain the first kill of the day. It was a great prize but came at a price: the ram had penetrated too far into the Phoenician ship, and the men could not extract it. The attacker’s goal was always to withdraw as quickly as possible after ramming. Otherwise, if his ram remained stuck in the enemy’s hull, he ran the risk of counterattack by the enemy’s marines and archers, either from their own deck or after boarding his; and the Persian deck troops outnumbered the Greeks.

  Aminias’s men knew all this. Below deck, they no doubt backed furiously but still could not move their ship. Above, they could hear the footsteps of their marines and archers as they took their positions to protect the trireme. They could also hear the shouts of the Persian marines eager to board Aminias’s boat. It was at this dangerous moment that other Greek ships came to Aminias’s defense. Up and down the line, the battle had begun.

  Meanwhile, the Phoenicians coped with the paradoxes of ramming. The trireme’s ram was as lethal as it was dramatic, but at first it proved deadlier to the victim’s hull than to its men. The opening made by a ram was perhaps only about one foot square in size. Water would pour into the rammed ship through the hole and would swamp the ship but not make it sink; there was time for the crew to get out. At the point of a ram’s impact a few men might die or be injured. Elsewhere on the vessel, other men might be injured by the force of the impact. But most men would probably make it through the ramming unharmed. Danger, however, lay ahead.

  Imagine a shower of arrows and javelins between the ships, parried when possible by shields but sometimes finding their mark. Imagine men collapsing on deck or being speared and then thrown into the water. Others would jump into the water voluntarily to escape a foundering ship, first removing helmets and armor to keep from sinking. Meanwhile, aboard the ships, some of the marines may have made it onto the enemy deck and settled matters in hand-to-hand combat. Sword clashed with dagger and with battle-ax, spear collided with spear.

  Hand-to-hand combat; close-quarter fighting; coming to grips; coming to blows: the Greeks delicately called all this the “law of hands.” Greek crewmen, as Herodotus notes, had a good chance of surviving the battle if they made it through the law of hands, since they could swim to safety. Not so the Persian and Mede marines: few of them knew how to swim, and so, many of them drowned.

  In the end, the Greeks managed to overpower the enemy and free Aminias, his crew, and their vessel. The triumphant victors carried off the stern ornament of the Phoenician ship, probably a figurehead in the shape of a human head. They might have lost a man or two in the fight, but there would be no time to mourn them, let alone to wash the blood off the deck.

  And so the battle of Salamis began—at least that is what the Athenians said. The Aeginetans told a different story. They claimed that the first Greek ship to start the attack was not the Athenian vessel of Aminias but the Aeginetan trireme bringing the statues of the sons of Aeacus. And they attributed the initiative to a miracle. The Aeginetans said that while the Greeks were backing water, there appeared an apparition of a woman. She exhorted the Greeks into battle in a voice loud enough for the entire Greek camp to hear. First, however, she gave them a piece of her mind. “Gentlemen, just how long are you going to keep on backing water?” she asked.

  Herodotus, who reports both stories, does not choose between them. Aeschylus says merely that a “Greek ship” began the ramming. He was perhaps not being politic so much as realistic. Not only was it difficult to reconstruct a battle years after the fact, it would have been difficult the next day. The Greeks had no official historians to record the details, and no timepieces aside from sundials and water clocks to mark the hours. Besides, Greek city-states were nothing if not competitive; Athens and Aegina, old enemies, were both naval powers; it would have been considered bad form for them to do anything less than argue over bragging rights to having drawn the first enemy blood. But the most important thing of all to remember is the confusion that reigned on the ancient naval battlefield.

  The vast majority of the men were below deck, where most could see nothing of what happened outside. Those on deck were generally too busy with matters nearby to take in the overall scene—a common problem in ancient warfare, as Thucydides remarks. The interplay of sun and clouds—and both were present at Salamis—could play tricks on one’s eyes, and so could fear and excitement.

  And then there was the noise. In a world without machines, the din of battle was perhaps the loudest sound imaginable. And no battle was noisier than one at sea. The clamors, shouting, and cheers of a naval engagement were commonplaces of classical literature. After the trumpets, the hymns, the battle cries, the rushing oars, and the piping, there came the cacophony of bronze-sheathed wooden rams crashing into wooden oars and ships. There was the twang of bowstrings and the whiz of arrows, the whirring of javelins and sometimes the metallic clang of swords. Afterward there came the screams of the dying. Meanwhile, the shores on both sides of the straits were lined with armed men, and it would not have been surprising if some women and children were present as well. The spectators emitted “wails, cries—winning, losing—and all the other various things that a great force in grea
t danger would have to utter,” as Thucydides writes of a later naval battle. At Salamis, all of this was magnified by the echoes of a narrow space ringed by hills.

  Through it all the rowing masters constantly cried out to their men. They called out not merely orders but appeals—pleas for harder effort, invocations of patriotism or of the greatness of empire, promises of rewards or threats of Xerxes’ wrath, references to national tradition and the need to live up to it. Well-trained crews knew the importance of keeping silent, both to preserve energy and to be able to hear the rowing masters.

  So—to return to Herodotus’s reluctance to choose whether Aegina or Athens drew first blood—the historian tacitly concedes the difficulty of fishing out the truth from the roiled and noisy waters of the straits. And yet another problem faced the historian: religion. Like the Aeginetans, many of the men who fought at Salamis came away convinced that only the gods could have won the battle for Greece. The numbers of the Persian fleet were so large, the preceding disasters at Thermopylae and on the Athenian Acropolis so awful, the situation of the refugees on Salamis so precarious, the defensive position at the Isthmus so shaky, that it seemed hard to believe that unaided human action had reversed the expected outcome. The Lady of Salamis is not the last divine intervention to be reported of the battle.

  Afterward, some claimed to have seen a great light shine out from the direction of Eleusis on the mainland, a few miles north of the straits. They also said that they heard the sound of voices filling the Thriasian plain beyond Eleusis, from the mountains to the sea, as if a crowd of men was participating in a religious procession—as in the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were held annually around the very day of the battle. Then out of the shouting crowd a cloud began to rise up little by little from the earth and land on the triremes.