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

by Barry Strauss

  By the time she was done, Artemisia would have molded most of her men into her willing instruments—and the rest would have been too frightened to put up resistance. And if Damasithymus had insulted their queen, then, by the gods, he deserved to have his ship sunk in order to defend the honor of the men who served her. And if Artemisia had wanted her marines to dirty their own hands, they would have drunk Calyndian blood if that is what it took to please her.

  Yet, for all that, it might have been simply the proximity of the Greeks that doomed Damasithymus. After all, why ask her men to do something that they might later regret, Artemisia might have reasoned, when the Greeks themselves would take care of silencing Damasithymus’s crew for her? Her own men, she might have concluded, had been compromised enough—by having rammed an ally’s ship—to ensure that they keep their mouths closed later.

  With so many Greek vessels around, there were plenty of ways for Calyndians to die. Swimming in the blue Aegean was one thing; swimming through the corpses and debris of a great naval battle was another. Some men might just never make it. Even good swimmers might have been brained by a passing trireme’s oars or have been pulled under a ship and drowned. Others might have been speared by enemy javelins. But the greatest threat was the archers, for whom men in the water made easy targets.

  The Greek sources, understandably, say nothing about Greek brutality to enemy swimmers at Salamis, but there might have been plenty of it. Savagery at sea was a by-product of grudge fights and do-or-die struggles. A trireme battle in 433 B.C., for example, pitted a furious Corinth against what it considered the ingratitude of its former colony, Corcyra. Corinth won the battle, and normally its captains would have then sailed among the wrecks and salvaged disabled enemy hulls for their own use. Instead, the Corinthian captains looked for Corcyrean survivors and butchered them in the water. In 413 B.C., Syracuse was fighting for its life against an Athenian invasion. While triremes battled in their harbor, the Syracusans added small boats to the struggle, some staffed by teenagers who used pitchforks to kill Athenians who had jumped from their wrecked ships.

  Stones, too, made good weapons to throw at men in the water, and we know that Athenians used stones against Persian land troops during the battle of Salamis. Small boats were present in the Greek fleet at Salamis, and the Athenians for one were angry enough to use them on a mission of vengeance, just as Athenian captains were ready to slaughter the men who had desecrated their temples.

  Timotheus makes the intriguing suggestion that Greeks fired flaming arrows at the Persian ships. He refers to “covers burning with fire on ox-[. . .] splints of wood; and their thronging life was slaughtered beneath the long-winged bronze-headed string-[. . . arrows].” He also says that “the strong and smoky fire will burn them [Persian young men] with its savage body.” The Persians had used these weapons in their attack on the Acropolis and may have used them again at Salamis; Timotheus’s account of the Greek view of the battle has not survived.

  Whether they used flaming arrows, spears, pitchforks, stones, or their own hands, the Greeks dealt brutally with the Persians in the water at Salamis. We can be sure of that, because in their invasion of the Greeks’ homeland, the Persians had abused a royal corpse, looted private property, burned temples, and raped, enslaved, and killed civilians. The Greeks would have had to have been angels not to have taken whatever revenge they could. And so between Artemisia’s men and the crews of the nearby Greek ships, Damasithymus and his men did not have a chance.

  But Xerxes, if Herodotus’s informant was right, did not know that Damasithymus’s crew was the victim of the cunning queen. He thought that Artemisia had rammed a Greek ship, which would have been a great deed on such a black day for his cause. But it was a bitter deed, too, as Xerxes is supposed to have noted by speaking a line that sums up Persia’s discontent: “My men have become women,” the Great King cried, “and my women have become men.”

  Aminias no doubt felt comfortable in his manhood, even if a mysterious vessel had beaten him to a fresh kill. There were plenty of other victims available for his fury. We are not certain how many enemy ships he rammed that day at Salamis, but we know that Aminias won a prize for valor after the battle. And his name lived on. Herodotus and Plutarch wrote about him. For a century and more, every schoolchild in Pallene is likely to have heard of Aminias as the deme’s favorite son—an honor for which the sleepy town in the Attic countryside provided no other candidates. When they visited the local temple of Athena Pallenis, the youth of Pallene might well have been able to see war booty deposited there by Aminias in the customary gesture of thanks to his hometown goddess. So a century after Salamis, when the Athenian navy commissioned a ship named Pallenis after the deme of Pallene, all thoughts might have turned to the glory days of Aminias in the fatal straits.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SALAMIS STRAITS: EVENING

  Polycritus son of Crius, heir to a family that is second to none in Aegina either in lineage or wealth, sits in the stern and waits. His squadron prowls the passage at the exit of the straits. There, whenever a Persian ship comes hurrying by in flight toward Phaleron, a bronze-beaked Aeginetan killer stalks his prey. And every time a ram smashes into the side of a Persian ship, great-hearted Polycritus imagines hearing the music of a bard, singing of the glory of the greatest man in the greatest navy in all Greece. Never mind the numbers of Athenian ships: only the democratic rabble could confuse mass with excellence. The thirty triremes of the Aeginetan company are as superior to Athens’s rowboats as a nobleman is superior to a mob. Or so we might imagine Polycritus thinking.

  Enervated and dehydrated, calloused and cramped, bleeding from scrapes and superficial arrow wounds, panting and perspiring, famished but furious, the oarsmen of Aegina row on, hour after hour, kill after kill. Deaf to the screams of the dying and the shouts of the spectators, stubborn in stifling the roar they want to bellow, they hear nothing but the orders of the rowing master and the sharp sound of the pipe. Below them was a scene of “the emerald-haired sea . . . reddened in its troughs by the drops from the ships, and there were battle cries mingled with screams.” Meanwhile, on deck, the Aeginetan marines rallied and filled any gaps in their ranks caused by Persian arrows.

  Shipwrecked men suffered from “spray [that] foamed and took over their esophagi”; they gasped and belched back sea brine; they gnashed their teeth and shouted insults; they shivered and raged at the approaching darkness. Phoenician rowers who had made it to the Attic shore sat “naked and frozen on the shore of the sea.” And still the triremes of Aegina rowed on, hunting new victims.

  The Persians did not give up their resistance until evening. This innocent-sounding fact underlines the remarkable nature of Persia’s rout. Once the Greeks had broken the Persian line and turned the Phoenicians and Ionians to flight, the battle should have effectively been over, except for the Greek pursuit. And yet the struggle went on for hours afterward. Geography and politics were to blame. The narrowness of the straits made it impossible for Persia’s front lines to flee toward Phaleron without crashing into the ships that were still coming forward.

  Aeschylus describes the collision that resulted:

  At first the flood of the Persian host

  Held firm. But when the mass of ships

  Crowded into the straits, there was no help for one ship from another,

  In fact they were struck by their own bronze-mouthed rams,

  And the whole oared armada began to shatter.

  The Greek ships very intelligently started to strike around

  In a circle, and the hulls of ships lay upside down,

  And the sea could no longer be seen because it was

  Full of shipwrecks and of the slaughter of men.

  The Greek poet Timotheus writes in a similar vein: “The barbarian Persian army went backwards in flight, rushing along; and one line of ships, sailing the long neck [of the sea], shattered another. . . .”

  But why did Persian triremes continue to come forward
after their best squadrons had been thrashed? Surely, somehow the message of defeat was spread from ship to ship. The problem was not communications; on the contrary, the more news of defeat, the greater the ambition of the rear ranks to get to the fore. Persian captains jockeyed for a place in the front lines in order to ram an enemy ship while Xerxes was watching and thus to be recorded in his list of men to reward afterward. While the Greek contingents at Salamis managed to put aside their rivalries and each fight for the common good, the Persian contingents each thought about its separate relationship with the Great King.

  By the same token, the Persian ships had little interest in continuing a struggle past the point where they might collect their reward. Compare the Spartan willingness to fight to the last man at Thermopylae with the Phoenicians’ decision to turn and leave the line at Salamis after they realized that they could not defeat the Athenians. The Spartan king Leonidas served a transcendent cause, while the Phoenician king Tetramnestus merely calculated the odds. Freedom was worth dying for, but there was no percentage in giving one’s life in exchange for power from the Great King that one would never enjoy.

  By the evening of September 25, the Greeks had pushed the chaotic mass of Persians back. The action in the battle of Salamis had returned to where the Persians had begun the night before, at the eastern end of the straits. While the Aeginetans lurked at the exit of the channel, the Athenians inside the straits drove Persian ships into their hands. Meanwhile, an Athenian commando unit had landed on the islet of Psyttaleia, which lay just to the south of the Aeginetan squadron. There, another proud man brought back bloody spoils and glorified his name. He was the Athenian Aristides son of Lysimachus. Rivals though their cities were, Aristides and Polycritus had one thing in common: hatred of Themistocles. And the ships of other Greek cities, too, recorded impressive kills; we may mention only Croton, Naxos, and Corinth.

  For Aegina’s ambush to succeed, we may imagine that it was crucial first to remove the Persians from the islet of Psyttaleia. Had they remained there, they could have signaled to their ships about the ambush, which would have allowed some of the Persian triremes to escape by speeding up, by hugging the coast, or perhaps by steering a zigzag course. On top of that, if the Aeginetans had tried to hide their vessels in the shadow of Psyttaleia, the Persians might have threatened the men with arrows. And so the Persians had to be removed. Besides which, the Athenians were in a mood to sweep the foreigner from any inch of their soil, however small, that they could.

  The mission was entrusted to a corps of Athenian infantryman under Aristides’ command. This “brave man,” the “best of the Athenians,” does not seem to have had command of a ship during Athens’s greatest naval battle. That is not surprising, considering that he was a returned political exile. Instead, he had his great moment when the Greeks broke the Persian line and chaos reigned among the Great King’s triremes. At this point it was safe to thin the ranks of the Athenian infantrymen lining the Salamis shore. Aristides gathered a large number of them—we do not know how many—and put them on small boats. They landed on Psyttaleia and slaughtered the Persians there down to the last man. A Roman-era source claims that there were four hundred Persians on Psyttaleia. Here is clear evidence of the spirit of revenge and bloodthirstiness that motivated the Greeks at Salamis.

  Aeschylus describes the incident with these dramatic words in the speech of a Persian messenger:

  When God had given the glory of the naval battle to the Greeks,

  That same day, after they had fenced their skin with well-bronzed armor,

  They leapt out of their boats and circled around the whole island,

  And we [Persians] were trapped without a thing to do. Many fell to the ground,

  Killed by stones from the Greeks’ hands or by the bowstring’s arrows.

  In the end they rushed upon us as one, striking us, hacking like meat

  Our unhappy limbs until the lives of all were utterly destroyed.

  Slaughtering the trapped Persians was a neat feat but not a difficult one.

  Both the carnage on Psyttaleia and the Aeginetan ambush represented mopping-up operations. The Persian navy had been defeated. Now was the time to kill as much of it as possible. As long as they retained their land army in Attica, the Persians could hold Phaleron as a secure base for the fleet. The Greeks, therefore, could not prevent all of Persia’s ships from escaping, but they would try to ram as many as they could.

  At Salamis, the Aeginetan navy fulfilled the promise of its magnificent tradition. Like the cities of Phoenicia, Aegina was a land of seafarers. Its merchant traders piled up wealth: the Aeginetan Sostratus son of Laodamas, for example, was the richest businessman in sixth century B.C. Greece. Thanks to its commerce, Aegina supported a population of about forty thousand, even though the small island had only enough farmland to feed about four thousand.

  The Aeginetan navy ruled the Saronic Gulf for decades. Even its gods were respected as mighty protectors in war at sea, as witnessed by the request of the Greeks at Salamis for the statues of the sons of Aeacus the day before the battle. Aegina’s navy had once been so dominant that before building its new fleet in 483 B.C., Athens was reduced to renting extra warships from Corinth in order to fight with Aegina, and the rentals secured only a temporary victory for Athens. On a memorable occasion long before, perhaps in the seventh century B.C., the Aeginetans had beat an Athenian invasion force so badly that only one man lived to tell the tale—and as soon as he straggled home, he was promptly murdered by a mob of angry Athenian widows. They stabbed him to death with the pins they used to fasten their dresses.

  At Salamis, the sailors of Aegina wanted not only to beat the Persians, they wanted to prove that they, and not the Athenian upstarts, deserved to rule the waves. On top of that, Athens’s democratic government sent shivers down the spines of Aegina’s upper classes. Barely ten years earlier, they had been forced to put down a democratic revolution on their island; they were incensed enough to hack off the hands of a revolutionary seeking sanctuary in a temple. Athens had been behind that revolution, so at Salamis, Aegina’s marines and commanders, who were prosperous to a man, were fired up to demonstrate the superiority of their oligarchic society to Athenian democracy, which they thought of as mob rule. Whether it was true that an Aeginetan and not an Athenian trireme had been the first to ram a Persian ship at Salamis, the Aeginetans no doubt felt that they deserved the honor.

  Aeginetan mistrust of Athens may help explain why Aegina had not sent all its triremes to Salamis. The Aeginetans kept other ships at home while their best triremes participated in the battle. Perhaps they feared that Athens might make a deal with the Persians, and so they wanted to maintain a reserve to defend their island. Another concern was defense against Persian raiders.

  Polycritus son of Crius was a man whose pride in his pedigree would have shown up a Persian grandee. Every ancient Greek name had a literal meaning, and Polycritus was a man to set store in the significance of his appellation, the same name borne by his father’s father. Polycritus was “Excellent Beyond Measure,” son of the “Ram.” Ten years before Salamis, the Athenians had dishonored the Ram. In 490 B.C., while the Persians prepared to invade Athens at Marathon, Aegina gave earth and water to Persia as signs of submission. No doubt the islanders were glad to join so powerful an ally against their hated foe.

  But the Athenians struck back by enlisting the help of Sparta, a strongly anti-Persian state even then. The Spartan king Cleomenes sailed to Aegina in order to arrest the men he regarded as traitors to Greece. But he was stopped by a strong-willed Aeginetan, none other than Polycritus’s father, Crius. Crius was not intimidated by the Spartan, whom he accused of having taken bribes.

  Livid but stymied, Cleomenes promised to return with reinforcements. With a dry but menacing Laconian wit, he said to the man whose name means “ram,”

  Better plate your horns with bronze, ram, because you are bringing down a heap of trouble on yourself.

  Cl
eomenes soon returned and arrested Crius, along with nine other prominent Aeginetans, and he sent them all as hostages to their bitterest enemies, the Athenians. Afterward, neither diplomacy nor force could get them back to Aegina. We do not know whether they ever returned home or died in Athens.

  For the sake of a common front against the barbarian in 480 B.C., Polycritus could forgive the Athenians all their crimes except one: he could not forgive the ruin of his father, caused by Athens’s alliance with Cleomenes. Polycritus was ready to shove his father’s name down every Athenian throat that he could. At the exit to the straits, he went far towards doing just that. While the Athenians drove Persian ships out of the channel, the Aeginetans closed the net. Herodotus writes:

  When the barbarians were put to flight and were sailing out toward

  Phaleron, the Aeginetans lay in ambush in the passage.

  “The passage” in Herodotus refers to the area just outside the Salamis straits, where the sea widens. We might guess that the Aeginetans hid their ships behind the Cynosura peninsula or behind the island of Psyttaleia, after Aristides had led the operation to drive the Persian soldiers from it.

  “Quiet, boys,” the rowing master would have told the men as Polycritus’s ship kept out of sight. We can imagine them sitting in silence until the next Persian ship flew by, hell-bent for Phaleron. Polycritus would have chosen carefully before ordering the attack, pausing just long enough to establish a good, long run-up for ramming without letting the Persian vessel get far enough ahead so that it could escape.

  Cooperation with Athens gave Aegina the opportunity to upstage its old enemy. It happened just after Polycritus’s trireme had rammed a fleeing ship from Sidon. Whether he knew it or not, this was a special prize, because the ship had been rated by the Persians as one of the ten fastest ships in their entire fleet. Polycritus then caught sight of Themistocles’ flagship, which happened to come near him while chasing an enemy vessel in flight. At this point in the fading day, Athenian triremes were fighting two different battles, one against enemy ships that made a stand and resisted and another against those that had given up and were in flight. But the resistance must have reached its finale for a commander of Themistocles’ importance to be willing to leave the straits.