Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Because the frenzied Greeks were determined to annihilate the occupiers of their homeland, and since, as Herodotus points out, “the greater part of the Barbarians drowned at sea because they did not know how to swim,” Salamis remains one of the most deadly battles in the entire history of naval warfare. More perished in the tiny strait than at Lepanto (ca. 40,000–50,000), all the dead of the Spanish Armada (20,000–30,000), the Spanish and French together at Trafalgar (14,000), the British at Jutland (6,784), or the Japanese at Midway (2,155). In contrast, only forty Greek triremes were lost, and we should imagine that the majority of those 8,000 Greeks who abandoned their ships were saved. Herodotus says only a “few” of the Greeks drowned, the majority swimming across the strait to safety. Rarely in the history of warfare has there occurred such a one-sided catastrophe—and rarely in the age before gunpowder have so many been slaughtered in a few hours.

  The Greco-Persian Wars, which until the battle of Mycale were fought exclusively in Europe, witnessed terrible butchery—none more awful than the thousands who drowned off the Attic coast. Drowning, in the Greek mind, was considered the worst of deaths—the soul wandering as a shade, unable to enter Hades should his body not be found and given a final proper commemoration. Almost eighty years later the Athenian court would execute its own successful generals after the sea victory at Arginusae (406 B.C.), precisely for their failure to pick up survivors bobbing in the water—and the idea that hundreds of Athenian husbands, fathers, and brothers were decomposing in the depths without proper burial.

  Who were Xerxes’ 40,000 sailors thrashing about in the strait of Salamis? Almost all of them are lost to the historical record. We know only a few names of the elite and well connected, and then only from Greek sources. Herodotus singles out only King Xerxes’ brother and admiral, Ariabignes, who went down with his ship. Aeschylus has a roll call of dead generals and admirals: Artembares “dashed against the cruel shore of Silenia”; Dadaces “speared as he jumped from his vessel”; the remains of the Bactrian lord Tenagon “lapping about the island of Ajax”; and so on. He goes on to name more than a dozen other leaders whose corpses were floating in the channel. In a particularly gruesome passage, presented on the Athenian stage a mere eight years after the battle, the playwright has a Persian messenger describe the human mess:

  The hulls of our ships rolled over, and it was no longer possible to glimpse the sea, strewn as it was with the wrecks of warships and the debris of what had been men. The shores and the reefs were full of our dead, and every ship that had once been part of the fleet now tried to row its way to safety through flight. But just as if our men were tunny-fish or some sort of netted catch, the enemy kept pounding them and hacking them with broken oars and the flotsam from the wrecked ships. And so shrieks together with sobbing echoed over the open sea until the face of black night at last covered the scene. (Persians 419–29)

  Many of these unfortunates were not Persians but conscripted Bactrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Cypriots, Carians, Cilicians, and men from other tributary states of the vast empire—including Ionian Greeks—who had voyaged to Salamis under coercion as part of Xerxes’ grand muster. The majority who rowed had little say about the conditions of their own participation, and even less desire for fighting in the strait of Salamis. Both Herodotus and Aeschylus relate that any hesitation on their part to row out on the morning of September 28 meant summary execution. One of the most gruesome passages in all of classical literature is Herodotus’s account of Pythius the Lydian, who asked the Great King that one of his five sons be allowed to remain behind to tend the old man when the imperial forces left Asia for Greece. In answer, Xerxes had Pythius’s favorite boy dismembered—his torso on one side of the roadway, legs on the other—so that the vast conscripted army who trudged between the mutilated and decaying parts for hours on end might learn the wages of disobedience. One of the ironies of Salamis is that the heroic Greek resistance, waged to thwart Persian aggression and preserve Greek freedom, actually resulted in the slaughter of thousands of reluctant allied Asian sailors. Under penalty of death, they fought as Xerxes watched the sea battle from his throne on Mount Aigaleos above—his secretary nearby to record his subjects’ gallantry and cowardice for rewards and punishments to follow.

  A decade earlier, 6,400 Persians died at Marathon during Darius’s ill-fated initial invasion. Just weeks before Salamis, more than 10,000 imperial troops were sacrificed in the Persians’ “victory” at Thermopylae to break the Hellenic resistance and open the pass into Greece. And at Artemisium near the pass, a storm may have sunk more than two hundred Persian ships, resulting in nearly as many drowned as at Salamis. In the following autumn another 50,000 subjects of Xerxes would die at Plataea, and yet 100,000 more during the last retreat out of Greece. A quarter million of the king’s troops were thus to perish in a vain attempt to take away the freedom of a tiny Balkan country of less than 50,000 square miles.

  The end of the Persian Wars signaled not merely a setback for Persia but a catastrophic loss of imperial manpower as well. “Divine Salamis,” as the Greeks commemorated the sea victory, was fought for “the freedom of the Greeks.” The price of that liberation was the mass slaughter of a host of peoples who had come under the whip, not out of religious, ethnic, or cultural hatred of Hellenic culture. Because none of Xerxes’ dead were free citizens in a free society, we understandably know almost nothing about them. There is no Persian play devoted to their memory. No Persian historian, as Herodotus had done at Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea, wrote down the names of the brave. Xerxes issued no civic decree from Persepolis offering commemoration for their sacrifice. Neither public cenotaph nor mournful elegy recorded their loss. We owe it to those anonymous and largely innocent dead to keep in mind that the story of Salamis is mostly the daylong saga of 40,000 men thrashing, shrieking, and sobbing as they slowly sank to the bottom off the Attic coast. As Lord Byron dryly wrote of the unnamed “they”:

  A king sate on the rocky brow Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis And ships, by thousands, lay below, And men in nations;—all were his! He counted them at break of day— And when the sun set where were they? (Don Juan, 86.4)

  THE ACHAEMENIDS AND FREEDOM

  The Persian Empire at the time of the battle of Salamis was huge—1 million square miles of territory, with nearly 70 million inhabitants—at that point the largest single hegemony in the history of the civilized world. In contrast, Greek-speakers on the mainland numbered less than 2 million and occupied about 50,000 square miles. Persia was also a relatively young sovereignty, less than a hundred years old, robust in its period of greatest power—and largely the product of the genius of its legendary king Cyrus the Great. In a period of not more than thirty years (ca. 560–530 B.C.), Cyrus had transformed the rather small and isolated Persian monarchy (Parsua in what is now Iran and Kurdistan) into a world government. He finally presided over the conquered peoples of most of Asia—ranging from the Aegean Sea to the Indus River, and covering most of the territory between the Persian Gulf and Red Sea in the south and the Caspian and Aral Seas to the north.

  After the subsequent loss of the Ionian Greek states on the shores of the Aegean, the mainland Greeks grew familiar with this huge and sophisticated empire now expanding near its eastern borders. What the Greeks learned of Persia—as would be the later European experience with the Ottomans—both fascinated and frightened them. Later an entire series of gifted politicians and renegade intriguers such as Demaratus, Themistocles, and Alcibiades would aid the Persians against their own Greek kin, and yet at the same time loathe their hosts for appealing nakedly to their personal greed. In a similar manner Italian admirals, ship designers, and tacticians would later seek lucrative employment with the Ottomans. Greek moralists, in relating culture and ethics, had long equated Hellenic poverty with liberty and excellence, Eastern affluence with slavery and decadence. So the poet Phocylides wrote, “The law-biding polis, though small and set on a high rock, outranks senseless Nineveh” (frg. 4
).

  By the time of the reign of Darius I (521–486 B.C.) Persia was a relatively stable empire, governed by the so-called Achaemenid monarchy that oversaw a sophisticated provincial administration of some twenty satrapies. Persian governors collected taxes, provided musters for national campaigns, built and maintained national roads and an efficient royal postal service, and in general left local conquered peoples the freedom to worship their own gods and devise their own means for meeting targeted levels of imperial taxation. To the Greeks, who could never unify properly their own vastly smaller mainland, the Achaemenids’ confederation of an entire continent raised the specter of a force of men and resources beyond their comprehension.

  What mystified Westerners most—we can pass over their prejudicial view of Easterners as soft, weak, and effeminate—was the Persian Empire’s almost total cultural antithesis to everything Hellenic, from politics and military practice to economic and social life. Only a few miles of sea separated Asia Minor from the Greek islands in the Aegean, but despite a similar climate and centuries of interaction, the two cultures were a world apart. This foreign system had resulted not in weakness and decadence, as the Greeks sometimes proclaimed, but ostensibly in relatively efficient imperial administration and vast wealth: Xerxes was on the Athenian acropolis, the Greeks (not yet) in Persepolis. An awe-inspiring impression of Persian power was what Greeks gleaned from itinerant traders, their own imported Eastern chattel slaves, communication from their Ionian brethren, the thousands of Greek-speakers who found employment in the Persian bureaucracy, and random tales from returning mercenaries. The success of the Achaemenid dynasty suggested that there were peoples in the world—and in increasing proximity to Greece—who did things far differently, and in the process became far more wealthy and prosperous than the Greeks.

  The absolute rule of millions was in the hands of a very few. The king and his small court of relatives and advisers (their Persian titles variously translate as “bow carrier,” “spear bearer,” “king’s friends,” “the king’s benefactor,” “the eyes and ears of the king,” etc.) oversaw the bureaucracy and priesthood, which thrived from the collection of provincial taxes and ownership of vast estates, while a cadre of Persian elites and Achaemenid kin ran the huge multicultural army. There was apparently no abstract or legal concept of freedom in Achaemenid Persia. Even satraps were referred to as slaves in imperial correspondence: “The King of Kings, Darius son of Hystapes, says these things to his slave Gadatas: ‘I learn that you are not obeying my commands in all respects . . .’ ” (R. Meiggs and D. Lewis, eds., Greek Historical Inscriptions, #12, 1–5). The Achaemenid monarch was absolute and, though not divine himself, the regent of the god Ahura Mazda on earth. The practice of proskynēsis— kneeling before the Great King—was required of all subjects and foreigners. Aristotle later saw this custom of worshiping men as gods as proof of the wide difference between Eastern and Hellenic notions of individualism, politics, and religion. Whereas the victorious Greek generals of the Persian Wars—the regent Pausanias in Sparta, Miltiades and Themistocles at Athens—were severely criticized for identifying their persons with the Greek triumph, Xerxes, when attempting to cross a choppy Hellespont, had the sea whipped and “branded” for “disobeying” his orders.

  Legal codes exist in every civilization. Under the Persians, local judiciaries were left in place at Lydia, Egypt, Babylonia, and Ionia—with the proviso that Achaemenid law superseded all statutes, and was established and amended as the Great King himself saw fit. Every man bobbing in the water on September 28 had no legal entity other than as a bandaka, or “slave,” of Xerxes—a concept taken from the earlier Babylonian idea that the individual was an ardu, a “chattel,” of the monarch.

  Contrarily, in Greece by the fifth century almost all political leaders in the city-states were selected by lot, elected, or subject to annual review by an elected council. No archon claimed divine status; execution by fiat was tantamount to murder; and the greatest vigilance was devoted to preventing the resurgence of tyrants, who had plagued a number of the most prosperous and commercial Greek states in the immediate past. Even personal slaves and servants in Greek city-states were often protected from arbitrary torture and murder. These were not alternative approaches to state rule, but fundamental differences in the idea of personal freedom that would help determine who lived and died at Salamis.

  The Persian imperial army was huge and commanded at the top by relatives and elites under oath to the king. At its core were professional Persian infantrymen—the so-called Immortals were the most famous— and various contingents of subsidiary heavy and light infantry, supported by vast forces of cavalry, charioteers, and missile troops. In battle the army depended on its speed and numbers. In place of a heavily armed shock force of pikemen that could shatter horsemen and ground troops, Persian infantrymen were often conscripted from hundreds of different regions, spoke dozens of languages, and were armed with swords, daggers, short spears, picks, war axes, and javelins, and protected by wicker shields, leather jerkins, and occasionally chain-mail shirts. Drill, strict adherence to rank and file, and coordinated group advance and retreat were largely unknown. The Greeks’ dismissive view about the quality of Persian heavy infantry was largely accurate. Some years later, in the early fourth century, Antiochos, a Greek ambassador from Arcadia, said there was not a man fit in Persia for battle against Greeks. There was no need during the creation of the Persian Empire on the steppes of Asia to field phalanxes of citizen hoplites outfitted in seventy-pound panoplies.

  The Achaemenid king was not always perched on a throne overlooking the killing ground—like Xerxes at Thermopylae and Salamis—but more regularly fought in a great chariot, surrounded by bodyguards, in the middle of the Persian battle line: both the safest and most logical position whence to issue orders. Greek historians made much of the obvious dissimilarity: Persian monarchs fled ahead of their armies in defeat, while there is not a single major Greek battle—Thermopylae, Delium, Mantinea, Leuctra—in which Hellenic generals survived the rout of their troops. Military catastrophe brought no reproach upon the Achaemenid king himself; subordinates like the Phoenicians at Salamis were scapegoated and executed. In contrast, there was also not one great Greek general in the entire history of the city-state—Themistocles, Miltiades, Pericles, Alcibiades, Brasidas, Lysander, Pelopidas, Epaminondas—who was not at some time either fined, exiled, or demoted, or killed alongside his troops. Some of the most successful and gifted commanders after their greatest victories—the Athenian admirals who won at Arginusae (406 B.C.), or Epaminondas on his return from liberating the Messenian helots (369 B.C.)—stood trial for their lives, not so much on charges of cowardice or incompetence as for inattention to the welfare of their men or the lack of communication with their civilian overseers.

  In such a vast domain as Persia, there were in theory thousands of individual landholders and private businessmen, but the economic and cultural contrast with fifth-century Greece was again telling. In classical Athens we do not know of a single farm larger than one hundred acres, whereas in Asia—both under the Achaemenids and later during the Hellenistic dynasties—estates exceeded thousands of acres in size. One of Xerxes’ relatives might own more property than every rower in the Persian fleet combined. Most of the best land in the empire was under direct control of priests, who sharecropped their domains to serfs, and absentee Persian lords, who often owned entire villages. The Persian king himself, in theory, had title to all the land in the empire and could either exercise rights of confiscation of any estate he wished or execute its owner by fiat.

  Greece itself had plenty of its own hierarchies concerning property owning, but the difference lay in the posture of a consensual government toward the entire question of land tenure. Public or religiously held estates were of limited size and relatively rare—comprising not more than 5 percent of the aggregate land surrounding a polis. Property was rather equitably held. Public auctions of repossessed farmland were standard, and pr
ices at public sales low and uniform. Lands in new colonies were surveyed and distributed by lot or public sale, never handed over to a few elites. The so-called hoplite infantry class typically owned farms of about ten acres. In most city-states they made up about a third to half of the citizen population and controlled about two-thirds of all the existing arable land—a pattern of landholding far more egalitarian than, say, in present-day California, where 5 percent of the landowners own 95 percent of all agricultural property.

  No Greek citizen could be arbitrarily executed without a trial. His property was not liable to confiscation except by vote of a council, whether that be a landed boule in broadly based oligarchies or a popular ekklēsia under democracy. In the Greek mind the ability to hold property freely—have legal title to it, improve it, and pass it on—was the foundation of freedom. While such classical agrarian traditions would erode during the later Roman Empire and the early Dark Ages, with the creation of vast absentee estates and ecclesiastical fiefdoms, the ideal would not be abandoned, but rather still provided the basis for revolution and rural reform in the West from the Renaissance to the present day.

  While there were vast state mints in Persia, our sources for Achaemenid imperial administration—borne out by the later arrival of the looters and plunderers in Alexander the Great’s army—suggest that tons of stored bullion remained uncoined and that there was a chronic stagnation in the Persian economy. With metals on deposit in imperial treasuries, provincial taxes were more often paid in kind as “gifts”—food, livestock, metals, slaves, property—rather than in specie, illustrative of high taxes and an undeveloped moneyed economy. One of the reasons for the initial rampant expansion and inflation of the later Hellenistic world (323–31 B.C.) was the sudden conversion of precious metals stored in the Achaemenid vaults into readily coined money by the Macedonian Successor kings, who, in transforming a command economy to a more capitalist one, hired out thousands of builders, shippers, and mercenaries.