Hundreds of books and articles have been written about the Greek last stand at Thermopylae and the accompanying sea battle at nearby Artemisium. But for all the gripping drama of the heroism at Thermopylae, the gallant sacrifice of Leonidas, and the death of the Spartan three hundred (along with nearly eleven hundred Thespians and Thebans and several hundred other allied Greeks who earlier perished as well), Thermopylae—which, along with the simultaneous naval fighting at Artemisium, marked one of the largest combined engagements in military history—was nevertheless a terrible defeat. The loss of the pass allowed the victorious Persian army a wide-open route into the wealthiest of the Greek city-states. If a Spartan king could not stop Xerxes, who could?18
The successive naval collisions at Artemisium proved only a nominal Greek victory. Themistocles’ aggressive tactics to draw the much larger but wary Persian fleet into the straits of Artemisium, his choice to engage in the unaccustomed late afternoon, and his reliance on speed, maneuver, and ramming, all continued to confound enemy triremes before they could deploy in proper order. By the naval battle’s end, the allies had destroyed far more Persian ships than they lost. Sudden storms caught the retiring Persian fleet without adequate harborage and wrecked dozens more of the surviving triremes.
But despite the damage to the huge Persian armada, in both battle and in rough seas—perhaps six hundred triremes were lost altogether—it was the Greek fleet that retreated southward. Xerxes’ wounded armada followed closely at their rear, supporting the land army that swept aside all opposition. For all Themistocles’ own daring, he had overseen failed efforts in Thessaly and now at Euboia. How could the Greeks save Athens and the Peloponnese when even a naval victory and providential gale proved inadequate to stop the Persian juggernaut?19
A Spartan king was dead, his corpse decapitated and shamed. The holding forces at the pass were wiped out. Their bodies were desecrated and put on display by Xerxes. The survivors of the original seven thousand Greeks of the land defense had scattered in panic to their homes with the news the Persians were not far behind. The victorious, but crippled, allied fleet limped back to the bay at Salamis.
Perhaps half the Greek navy had been damaged or destroyed. Over a hundred triremes needed repair work. More ominously, most of the Greek city-states north of Athens had already joined the Persians or were making arrangements to do so. There would be no second Thermopylae. Xerxes’ forces were growing again, the allies shrinking, and the king was supplying his forces from the “earth and water”—the symbolic manifestations of Greek surrender—of his Greek hosts. The Athenians’ desperate appeal to field another Panhellenic army to stop the Persians on its northwestern borders with Boeotia was ignored by the Peloponnesian infantry. They preferred to stream home in defeat to the Isthmus.
Any Greek state that was not defended by the retreating alliance either was obliterated or joined the Persians. An overrun Thebes allied with Xerxes, a terrible loss for the remaining free Greeks given its excellent army. The polyglot forces of imperial Persia were more united than the Greeks who shared the same religion, language, and culture. The only debate for the dwindling resistance was over the location and nature of a glorious, but probably doomed, Greek last stand—even as Themistocles led the Athenian contingent home to rally what he almost alone hoped would be a Panhellenic naval response pledged to the salvation of his own city.20
Panic at Athens (September 480 B.C.)
The Athenians, during the Persian rush into Greece, had hastily consulted the oracle at Delphi. Their envoys received various responses from the always politically astute Pythia. The last and most famous reply from the wily priestess offered cryptic advice: First, retreat before the enemy; second, trust in a mysterious “wooden wall”; and third, put hope in a “Holy Salamis” and thereby the promise that the Greeks might at some date “destroy” the Persians.
Dispute broke out over the oracle’s deliberately ambiguous meaning. For those Athenians who did not wish to fight at sea at Salamis—or were too poor or elderly to flee the city—the prophecy was either gibberish or perhaps recommended a defense on the Athenian Acropolis behind wooden walls of old doors, castoff furnishings, and rough logs. But Themistocles persuaded his fellow generals that Delphi’s “wooden wall” could only refer to their own fleet of pine- and fir-planked triremes. Why, after all, would the oracle at Delphi call Athenian-held Salamis “holy,” if she did not mean victory was assured there for the Greeks should they dare fight by sea? Whether Themistocles’ agents had something to do with cooking up the prophecy, or twisting its interpretation, we do not know. But he certainly was not going to let the superstitious or pusillanimous thwart his plans to gamble all at Salamis, a strategy based on a decade of reasoning, not prophetic hocus-pocus.21
The real divide at Salamis arose over the proper way to defend the Athenians from hundreds of thousands of Persians. The enemy infantry and marine forces had not suffered a single defeat in the five months since their arrival in Europe. Two defensive strategies were hotly debated—the first among Athenians themselves, whether to protect the city proper or evacuate the population, and a second between the remaining city-states of the alliance over whether to fight at sea in the Bay of Salamis or to fall back southward even further.
Some of these deliberations were cut short when Xerxes arrived in Attica and quickly stormed Athens. The king’s forces in short order had surrounded the Acropolis, where a diehard Athenian contingent proved that the oracle did not mean their futile barricade was any sort of literal “wooden wall.” No prisoners were taken. Themistocles had previously introduced a decree to evacuate the city (a later version of the original proclamation on stone was first published in 1960) that directed the Athenians to the nearby islands and the northern Argolid. The city-state’s defense was reduced to those who manned about 180 triremes in the Bay of Salamis, along with small contingents of hoplites.
The renegade Spartan ex-king Demaratus, now a Persian court adviser, had urged Xerxes to avoid Salamis. Instead, he argued, the Persians should sail around the Peloponnese to occupy the island of Cythera off Sparta. That way, Demaratus insisted, the Persians could avoid losses, tie down the Spartan army, and raise a revolt of the city-state’s agricultural serfs, the helots—perhaps putting Demaratus himself back in power at Sparta as a puppet satrap king. With Athens in flames and the Greek fleet trapped in the straits of Salamis, however, such wise but cautious advice seemed timid to Xerxes. Instead, once the Greek armada was easily swamped here at Salamis, the Persians could simply land troops wherever they pleased in the Peloponnese. The plan was to pick off the few remaining city-states one by one.22
For their part, other Greek leaders had proposed several complicated alternative strategies before and after the retreat from Thermopylae. Many Athenians, for example, still wished to fight on the Attic plain, not at sea, in some sort of decisive infantry confrontation that might repeat the verdict of Marathon and save their city while restoring the prestige of the hoplite class. But that dream was quickly tabled after the disaster at Thermopylae. The rapidity of the Persian onslaught, the absence of willing allies, and the fact that King Xerxes this time had far more land forces than his father, Darius, had sent ten years earlier, for now all made another Marathon impossible. Those at Marathon had been outnumbered three to one. But the Persian land forces were at least ten times larger than the Athenian hoplite army. Only a few isolated pockets of Athenians remained holed up in the Attic countryside.23
The second option, of garrisoning the city proper, had already proved suicidal. The few who had remained at Athens to defend the wooden ramparts on the Acropolis were dead.
A third choice was simply for Athenians and the remaining allies to quit and join the Persians. Some Athenians were furious at the Peloponnesian city-states for abandoning them to the Persians without a fight. Many felt their cause was hopeless. Still, most at Salamis stayed firm. As long as the surviving Greek states had nearly four hundred ships, and the soil of the Megarid and
the Peloponnese was still Greek, such surrender seemed premature, even if it meant tens of thousands of Athenians camping in the countryside without adequate shelter and food.
Most of the remaining allies, in fact, initially preferred a fourth and more defensible choice: to fight on land behind makeshift ramparts along the six-mile-wide isthmus. That strategy might save what was left of Greece to the south. The ships of Athens that way could retreat southward and engage the enemy somewhere off the coast of the Peloponnese. Who could object to that? The maritime Athenians, after all, earlier had not offered any of their ten thousand hoplites to fight at the shared land defense of Thermopylae. Now, in tit-for-tat fashion, the land powers of the Peloponnese preferred not to risk any of their own ships in the defense of an evacuated Athens.
Still, Themistocles wondered whether the Spartan proposals even served their own best interests. What then would prevent a Persian amphibious landing behind an isthmus wall (of the sort the turncoat Demaratus had in fact advised Xerxes to make)? Would not fighting in more open seas off the Peloponnese only give more advantages to a far larger enemy fleet? Why would the Athenians be willing to sacrifice any hope of recovering their city only to fight on behalf of Peloponnesians who clearly all along cared only for their own defense? More immediately, what would the assembled Greeks do about thousands of hungry refugees on Salamis, whose safety depended on the Greek ships in the harbors of the island? Who could restore morale after four successive withdrawals—from the Vale of Tempe in Thessaly, Thermopylae, Artemisium, and Salamis? An alliance that either loses battles or does not fight them finds it almost impossible to turn on its aggressor and cede no more ground.24
The squabbling Greeks before Salamis heard yet a fifth alternative—a most bizarre threat from Themistocles himself. He warned that the furious and betrayed Athenians would pull up stakes entirely. If the Athenians were to be sacrificed by their Peloponnesian and island allies, and a general retreat ordered to the south, then Themistocles would round up the city’s refugees. He would sail them to distant Sicily and shuttle more than two hundred thousand Athenian residents near their colony at Siris—rebirthing Athenian culture in safety eight hundred miles to the west and ensuring that the Greeks’ largest fleet would not fight for those still free in the Peloponnese.
“If you do not [fight at Salamis],” Themistocles warned his Peloponnesian allies, “then we quite directly shall take up our households and sail over to Siris in Italy, a place which has been ours from ancient times, and at which the oracles inform us that we should plant a colony. And the rest of you without allies such as ourselves, will have reason to remember my words.”25
The final bad choice from among the far worse alternatives was for the remaining allies to fight a sea battle at Salamis. They would cede no more Greek territory. Instead, the admirals would preserve Greek unity and hope to cripple the Persian fleet—and with it any chance of escape of the massive army of Xerxes. Because there were finite supplies at Salamis, and thousands of refugees to feed, there was no time left for talk. The battle had to be joined almost immediately, even if most of the assembled admirals would have to give in to Themistocles’ threats and override the original wishes of their own political authorities back home to retreat to a Panhellenic defense at the Isthmus.26
Holy Salamis (September 480 B.C.)
The historian Herodotus and the contemporary playwright Aeschylus, along with much later accounts in Plutarch, Diodorus, and Nepos, believed that the reconstituted Greek fleet was outnumbered by at least two or three to one. In fact, it may have been only one-fourth the size of the Persian fleet. There is no information how many reinforcement ships joined the respective naval forces after the mutual losses from Artemisium, or how many trireme hulls were repaired. But ancient accounts suggest that between Persian replacements and the growing number of “Medizing” Greeks, the enemy was still at least as large as when it had left Persia months earlier.
If some Greeks quietly slipped away from Salamis and headed southward, most stayed. Even after wear and tear on the fleet, and losses at Artemisium, if the Greek fleet did not number 366 triremes exactly, there still may have been well over three hundred Greek vessels at Salamis. They were waiting to take on a Persian armada of at least six hundred warships—although both Herodotus and Aeschylus record that the enemy fleet had been reinforced to more than twelve hundred ships. That huge figure cannot be entirely discounted, although it implies a quarter million Persian seamen to man such an armada. In any case, there may well have been well over two hundred thousand sailors assembled at Salamis, making it one of the largest sea battles in history.27
The Greek fleet, still under the nominal overall command of the Spartan Eurybiades, was less experienced than the imperial Persian flotilla. Greek triremes were heavier and less maneuverable, their crews greener. The king’s armada was composed of various veteran contingents from Phoenicia, Egypt, Asia Minor, Cyprus, and Greece itself. Most of these navies had patrolled the Aegean and Mediterranean for years enforcing the edicts of the Persian Empire. Perhaps more Greek-speaking crews from Ionia and the Aegean would fight on the Persian than on the Hellenic side.
The alliance’s best hope was to draw the Persians into the narrows between Salamis and the Attic mainland. Once there, the more numerous but lighter enemy triremes might prove vulnerable to the heavier, sturdier, and presumably slower Greek ships. Themistocles reasoned that the invaders also might not have enough room to maneuver and utilize all their triremes. Without more open seas, the Persians would lose the advantages of both their numbers and their superior nautical skill.
Surprise—and greater knowledge of currents and contrary winds inside the straits—would also aid the defenders. The unity of the Greeks versus the motley nature of the subject Persian armada, the psychological advantages defenders enjoy over aggressors, the hope that free peoples fight for their own destiny more stoutly than subjects do amid their subservience—all these, at least in Themistocles’ mind, could become force multipliers and so might still trump Persian numbers.28
Various sources also refer to an improbable ruse on the part of Themistocles on the eve of the battle. He secretly sent his own slave Sicinnus on a mission to Xerxes, with a purported warning of an unexpected Greek withdrawal. The Persians might well have swallowed that strange story of Themistocles’ treachery, given the rumors of Greek infighting and the well-reported Peloponnesian desire to go home. Themistocles’ intention with the trick was threefold: First, he wanted to incite the Persians hastily to deploy and prematurely man their ships in the dark. Second, he hoped to fool them into splitting their larger enemy fleet to cover unnecessarily all the exits from the straits of Salamis. Third, Persian preemption would force reluctant Greek allies to commit to the sea battle and mobilize immediately in the face of the advancing Persian enemy. A fourth result, or so it was also alleged in antiquity, was that Themistocles could later claim that he had tried to do the Persians a favor, if they won, or if in the future he needed exile in a safe place. Apparently, the agreement to stay at Salamis had strengthened the position of Themistocles. In the few hours before battle, he began to exercise tactical authority despite the nominal overall command of Eurybiades.
In response, the Persians, without careful planning, rowed out into the straits of Salamis, just as Themistocles anticipated—but not before dispatching parts of their Egyptian squadrons to block the southern and western entrances to the strait. In short, Xerxes had sent some of their best contingents on a wild-goose chase to ambush a Greek retreat that never came. The result was the Persians could not make full use of their numerical superiority inside the confining narrows of the Salamis strait itself, where the battle was to be fought.29
Xerxes probably attacked just before dawn. As the September morning breeze picked up, the Persian fleet rowed forward in three lines against the Greeks’ two, its captains worried that they “would lose their heads” should the enemy fleet escape. Quickly the attackers became disorganized due to th
e Greek ramming and the confusion of having too many ships in too-confined waters—and the shocking sight that the Greeks—the Athenians on the left wing, the Spartans on the right—far from fleeing, were heading en masse right toward them. Themistocles himself was at the vanguard of the advancing Greek triremes. Xerxes, in contrast, watched his Persians from afar, purportedly perched on his throne atop nearby Mount Aigaleos on the Attic shore. In the words of the dramatist Aeschylus, “The mass of ships was crowded into the narrows, and none was able to offer help to another.”30
The sea battle was fought all day—most likely sometime between September 20 and 30, 480 B.C., perhaps on the morning of September 25. By nightfall half the Persian fleet was sunk, due both to poor tactics and leadership and to the superior morale and seamanship of the crews of the Greek triremes, who knew far better the tides and currents of Salamis Bay—and that defeat meant the enslavement of their families watching from the beaches. The surviving Persian fleet headed back to port and made preparations to flee back to Asia Minor before the Greeks demolished their pontoon bridge over the Hellespont.
The morale of the surviving fleet was shattered, despite their collective fear of the outraged king watching from above. The Persians suffered “utter and complete ruin.” Although in theory the surviving defeated enemy still outnumbered the Greek fleet, the Persian armada was neither battleworthy nor eager to reengage the victorious Greek triremes. Perhaps more than eighty thousand imperial sailors were killed, wounded, missing, or dispersed—which would make Salamis the most lethal one-day naval battle in history, more bloody than even an Ecnomus, Lepanto, Trafalgar, Jutland, or Midway.
Ancient accounts record the macabre scene of the human carnage where Persian corpses were “battered by the surf, lifeless, tossed here and there in their cloaks.” And given that most of the Persians could not swim, we should assume the Greeks speared any survivors clinging to the flotsam and jetsam, knocking them beneath the waves—“hitting and hacking them with broken oars and the wreckage of the ships.” Ancient sea battles were usually fought near land, and with triremes that became partially submerged rather than sank outright. Nevertheless, the inability of Persians to swim and the likelihood that many were fully clothed perhaps made their losses much higher than among the Greek allies.31
The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq Page 4
