The Persians, perhaps fooled by a ruse of Themistocles, believed that the Athenians were retreating southward via the Bay of Eleusis through the strait of Megara. In response, they split and thus weakened their forces by sending ships to block the passages off both the northern and the western shores of Salamis as well. The king’s fleet attacked just before dawn, rowing forward in three lines against the Greeks’ two. Very quickly, the armada became disorganized due to the Greek ramming and the confusion of having too many ships in such confined waters. The uniformity of the Greek crews, their superior discipline and greater morale help explain why they were able to strike the enemy ships repeatedly without being boarded by the numerically superior enemy. The experienced Egyptian contingent did not fight at all, but waited in vain far to the north for an expected Greek retreat off Megara.
Themistocles led the Panhellenic attack in his own trireme. His sheer magnetism and threats had kept the Greeks together after the Persian occupation of everything north of the isthmus; and his secret but false promises to the Persian king of a surrender on the eve of the battle had fooled Xerxes about the real Greek intent. Throughout our brief ancient descriptions, the common theme is Greek discipline in attack—ships advancing in order, as crews methodically rowed, backwatered, and rammed on command—contrasted with the chaos and disruption of the Persians, who vainly tried to board Greek triremes at random and kill the crews.
The battle was fought for perhaps eight hours sometime between September 20 and 30, but most likely September 28. By nightfall the ships of the Persian fleet were either sunk or scattered, and the morale of the invading sailors lost. Most enemy vessels were sunk by ramming, as Greek triremes darted in and out of the clumsy Persian formations, which quickly became dispersed as national contingents operated independently and in their own interests. Although in theory the fleeing enemy still outnumbered the Greek fleet, the Persian armada was no longer battleworthy, with more than 100,000 imperial sailors killed, wounded, missing, dispersed, or sailing back across the Aegean.
Within a few days Xerxes himself began the march home to the Hellespont, accompanied by 60,000 infantry and leaving behind his surrogate commander, Mardonius, with a still enormous force to continue the struggle on the Greek mainland the next year. The Greeks immediately declared victory. The Athenians would soon reoccupy Attica. Within a few months Hellenic infantrymen streamed in from all over Greece to finish off the Persian land forces, who had retired northward into Boeotia and were camped at Plataea.
ELEUTHERIA
Free Seamen at Salamis
The outnumbered, poor, and beleaguered Greeks of 480 B.C., as is the lot of the invaded in all wars, still had some intrinsic advantages over the Persians: knowledge of local terrain, favorable logistics, and the possibility of using fortifications to offset the numbers of their opponents. Herodotus also makes much of the superior bronze panoply of the Greek infantrymen that proved so critical at the land battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, and Plataea. The Persians themselves seemed dumbfounded by the Greek willingness to seek out an all-destructive decisive battle, especially the terrifying propensity of the phalanx for shock collisions. They had no concept of the Greek discipline that put a premium on close-order fighting, in which the warrior’s prime directive was to stay in rank, rather than kill great numbers of the enemy. Those innate Western military characteristics would resurface in the next century, and they help to explain why a European Xenophon, Agesilaus, and Alexander, with a mere few thousand troops, could do in Asia what Xerxes with hundreds of thousands could not in Europe.
All that being said, the Greeks who rammed the enemy head-on at Salamis believed that freedom (eleutheria) had proved to be the real key to their victory. Freedom, they believed, had made their warriors qualitatively better fighters than the Persians—or any other unfree tribe, people, or state to the west as well as east—breeding in them a superior morale and greater incentive to kill the enemy. Aeschylus and Herodotus are clear on this. While we are not so interested in their respective descriptions of Persian customs and motivations, which are often secondhand and can be biased, both authors are believable in reflecting what the Greeks believed was at stake at Salamis.
The moral drawn by Herodotus, for example, is unmistakable: free citizens are better warriors, since they fight for themselves, their families and property, not for kings, aristocrats, or priests. They accept a greater degree of discipline than either coerced or hired soldiers. After Marathon (490 B.C.), Herodotus makes the point that the Athenians fought much better under their newly won democracy than during the long reign of the Peisistratid tyrants: “As long as the Athenians were ruled by a despotic government, they had no better success at war than any of their neighbors. Once the yoke was flung off, they proved the finest fighters in the world.” Herodotus explains why this is so: in the past “they battled less than their best because they were working for a master; but as free men each individual person wanted to achieve something for himself” (5.78).
When asked why the Greeks did not come to terms with Persia at the outset, the Spartan envoys tell Hydarnes, the military commander of the Western provinces, that the reason is freedom:
Hydarnes, the advice you give us does not arise from a full knowledge of our situation. You are knowledgeable about only one half of what is involved; the other half is a blank to you. The reason is that you understand well enough what slavery is, but freedom you have never experienced, so you do not know if it tastes sweet or not. If you ever did come to experience it, you would advise us to fight for it not with spears only, but with axes too. (Herodotus 7.135)
Aeschylus, as the chapter epigraph indicates, suggested that the Greeks went to battle at Salamis exhorting each other to “Free your native soil. Free your children, your wives, the images of your fathers’ gods, and the tombs of your ancestors!” (Persians 402–5). After the victory at Salamis the Athenians turned down all offers of mediation with a curt dismissal: “We ourselves know well the power of the Persian is many times that of our own; it is not necessary to taunt us on that account. Nevertheless, out of our zeal for our freedom, we shall defend ourselves in any way that we are able” (Herodotus 8.143). To the Greeks freedom was almost religious in nature. The Athenians worshiped the abstractions of “Democracy” and “Freedom,” the latter as part of the cult of Zeus Eleutherios (“Zeus the Freedom-Giver”)—deities that did more for the average Athenian than Ahura Mazda had ever done for a Persian subject.
Herodotus himself editorialized of the victory at Salamis, “Greece was saved by the Athenians . . . who, having chosen that Greece should live and preserve her freedom, roused to battle the other Greek states which had not yet submitted” (7.139). Almost a year later at the battle of Plataea, the Hellenic alliance required each soldier before the battle to swear an oath beginning, “I shall fight to the death, and I shall not count my life more valuable than freedom” (Diodorus 11.29.3). After the conclusion of the war, the Greeks dedicated a monument of their victory at the sanctuary at Delphi with the inscription “The saviors of wide Greece set up this monument, having delivered their city-states from a loathsome slavery” (Diodorus 11.33.2).
Not only did ancient observers believe that Salamis and the other battles of the Persian Wars were fought on behalf of freedom against a “loathsome slavery,” but in an abstract sense they agreed that being free was the foundation for the battle morale that would overcome the superior numbers and wealth of any potential enemy. Greek authors repeatedly associated battle proficiency with a free militia; freedom in itself did not ensure victory but gave an army an advantage that might on any occasion cancel out the superior generalship, numbers, or equipment of an enemy. Aristotle, who lived in an age of increasing use of mercenary troops, nevertheless had no doubt about this relationship between freedom and military excellence. Of the free city-state, he wrote: “Infantrymen of the polis think it is a disgraceful thing to run away, and they choose death over safety through flight. On the other hand, profession
al soldiers, who rely from the outset on superior strength, flee as soon as they find out they are outnumbered, fearing death more than dishonor” (Nicomachean Ethics 3.1116b16–23).
There was always the obvious contrast of free Greeks with the largely multicultural army of serfs who were routinely mustered by imperial Persia. Xenophon, for example, makes Cyrus the Younger explain to his Greek mercenaries before the battle of Cunaxa (401 B.C.) why he has hired them to fight his own people:
Men of Greece, it is not because I do not have enough barbarian troops that I have led you here to fight on my behalf. But rather I brought you here because I thought you were braver and stronger than many barbarian soldiers. Therefore make sure that you will be worthy of the freedom [eleutherias] that you possess and for which I greatly admire you. For you know well that freedom [eleutherian] is one trait that I would choose before everything else that I have and much more besides. (Anabasis 1.7.3–4)
This passage reflects all the traditional stereotypes of a Greek author. Still, we should not forget three salient facts. One, Xenophon himself was a veteran of campaigns in which Greeks defeated Asian troops on every occasion. Two, Darius, Xerxes, Cyrus, and Artaxerxes (and Darius III to come) all hired large numbers of Greek mercenaries, while almost no Greek poleis—and many had capital to employ troops from almost everywhere in the Mediterranean world—ever sought out Persian infantry. Three, Cyrus acknowledges that the priceless freedom he alone enjoys by virtue of being an autocrat in Persia is extended on the other side of the Aegean Sea to the common man. Seventy years later at Cunaxa, not far from where the Ten Thousand had routed their Persian adversaries, Alexander the Great, who had done as much as anyone to destroy Greek freedom, nevertheless reminded his Macedonians on the eve of the battle of Gaugamela (331 B.C.) that they would win easily. They were, the king boasted, still free men fighting against the slave subjects of Persia.
Throughout Greek literature the singularity of Greek freedom is made clear, a strange idea that seems in its abstract sense not to have existed in any other culture of the time, but emerged in the seventh and sixth centuries among Greek-speakers in the small, relatively isolated farming valleys of the mainland, the Aegean islands, and the western Greek coast of Asia Minor. The word “freedom” or its equivalent—like the equally odd “citizen” (politēs), “consensual government” (politeia), and “democracy” (dēmokratia, isēgoria)—seems not to be found in the lexicon of contemporary ancient languages other than Latin (e.g., libertas; cf. civis, res publica). Neither tribal Gauls to the north nor sophisticated Egyptians south of the Mediterranean entertained such preposterous ideas.
The freedom of the Greek city-states was not the de facto freedom of tribal nomads who seek only to roam unchecked. The historian Diodorus, for example, admitted that even wild animals fight for their “freedom.” Nor was it the unbridled latitude that the elite rulers in a ranked society such as Persia or Egypt enjoyed. Rather, the Greeks’ discovery of eleutheria turned out to be a concept that could transcend the vagaries of time and space—urban and rural, a dense or a sparse landscape, consensual government that was narrowly defined as in oligarchies, or broadly practiced as in democracies. It ensured the individual citizen freedom of association, freedom to elect representatives, freedom to own property and acquire wealth without fear of confiscation, and freedom from arbitrary punishment and coercion.
Within the more than 1,000 city-states not everyone was free. In the four-century history of the autonomous polis (700–300 B.C.) there were gradations in which property qualifications were high, moderate, and nonexistent, and office-holding was variously open to the few, many, and all. In many cases there were nominal citizens who could not vote or voice their opinions so freely and publicly—though even the most oligarchic states never attempted to establish a theocracy that might control the social, cultural, and economic behavior of its subjects. Western autocracies in general that did arise never succeeded to the degree of Eastern despots in controlling the lives of their subjects. Still, none of the city-states from the Black Sea to southern Italy extended political equality to women, slaves, and foreigners. Such laudable concepts were confined to utopian thinkers and comic poets like Aristophanes, the pre-Socratics, Plato, and the Stoic philosophers.
In regard to such Greek political discrimination, we might keep in mind two considerations. First, by and large, the sins of the Greeks—slavery, sexism, economic exploitation, ethnic chauvinism—are largely the sins of man common to all cultures at all times. The “others” in the Greek world—foreigners, slaves, women—were also “others” in all other societies of the time (and sometimes continue to be “marginalized” in non-Western cultures today, if the continuance of slavery in Africa, the caste system in India, and the mutilation of women is any indication). Second, freedom is an evolving idea, a miraculous and dangerous concept that has no logical restrictions on its ultimate development once it is hatched. The early poleis of the seventh and sixth centuries insisted on property qualifications, which were dropped by Athens and other democracies in the fifth. By the Macedonian conquest of the fourth century, in literature, on the stage, in philosophical debate and oratory, Greeks were calling for a freedom and equality that might extend to others besides the native-born male citizen. We must be careful not to expect perfection from the first two centuries of freedom’s existence; we should instead appreciate how peculiar it was to have appeared so early in any form at all.
The Meaning of Freedom
If we were to ask a Greek sailor at Salamis, “What is this freedom you row for?,” he might provide a four-part answer. First, freedom to speak what he pleased. The Greeks, in fact, had not one, but two, words for free speech: isēgoria, equality in the right to speak publicly in the Assembly, and parrhēsia, the right to say what one wished. As Sophocles put it, “Free men have free tongues” (frg. 927a)—and we see just such unfettered expression not only on the Athenian stage but throughout the campaign at Salamis. Councils were called constantly. The Athenians debated on whether to evacuate Attica, the Peloponnesians whether to fight at the Isthmus of Corinth, and all the Greeks whether to stake all at Salamis—and then, when and how. Statesmen such as Eurybiades, Themistocles, Adeimantus, and the other generals shouted and screamed at each other in heated open disputation. These nearly constant deliberations Herodotus characterized as “wars of words” or “a great pushing match of words.” Before the battle, men in the streets freely offered their opinions—what the historian Diodorus called the “unrest of the masses”—and generals in consequence fanned out to monitor the public pulse. Later the Athenians even had their triremes named Dēmokratia, Eleutheria, and Parrhēsia—nomenclature that would have gotten their captains decapitated in the Persian armada. The idea that a Persian ship would be called Free Speech is inconceivable.
Such license was not present on the Persian side. The result was inferior strategy, a high command removed from the realities of the fleet, and no sense that any Persian admiral had any hand in the plan of attack. Aeschylus makes a chorus of Persian elders lament that the defeat at Salamis boded ill: “No longer will men keep a curb on their tongues; for now people are free to express their thoughts as they pleased once the yoke of imperial power has been broken” (Persians 591–92). The Spartan turncoat Demaratus advises Dicaeus not to voice his fears for the Persian fleet before his king, Xerxes: “Keep your silence and speak to no other person. If your words were reported to the king, you will lose your head” (Herodotus 8.65). After the battle the Phoenician admirals came to Xerxes to complain that they had been betrayed by the Ionian Greeks, who had deserted the Persian cause. Their criticism displeased Xerxes, and so he had them all decapitated. As Greek rowers closed on their enemy, they pulled with the assurance that they could air their concerns about the fighting, whereas Persian sailors realized that to do so might mean their own immediate execution.
Second, the Greek rowers at Salamis also fought with the belief that their governments at Athens, Corinth, Aegina
, Sparta, and the other states of the Panhellenic alliance were based on the consent of the citizenry. Men like Themistocles and Eurybiades were either elected directly by the people or appointed by popular representatives. At Salamis Greek rowers rammed their opponents’ ships on the assurance that the battle was of their own choosing; the invaders who drowned accepted the stark truth that they were in the channel solely because of the fancy of the Persian king. Over the long haul, men fight better when they know that they have had the freedom to choose the occasion of their own deaths.
In the aftermath of Salamis the Greek veterans of the battle voted awards for heroism and commendation. In contrast, imperial scribes brought their lists down from Xerxes’ perch to mete out punishment for the Persian disaster. Earlier at the battle of Thermopylae, Persian soldiers, as was routine, were whipped by their officers to charge the Greeks, while the Spartans willingly decided to sacrifice themselves to the man for the cause of Greek freedom. Hitting a Greek hoplite while on campaign might prompt a public audit of a general’s conduct. Lashing Persian infantry was seen as essential in maintaining the morale of the Persian army. Themistocles, rebuked by his own sailors, pilloried in the Athenian Assembly, and attacked in the Panhellenic council, rowed to victory beside his own men, while Xerxes sat on an ornate stool far above the channel— with every one of his impressed sailors below terrified that the eye of the Great King was upon him. Coercion and fear of execution can be wonderful incentives to fight, but the Greeks were right that freedom in the long run is a far better motive still.
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Page 7
