To Xerxes, sitting pretty in the Athenian acropolis, it seemed as if the hand of Ahura Mazda himself was guiding affairs, ensuring the defeat of the servants of the Lie. No one present would have forgotten the fate of the last Greek attempt to defeat a Persian armada. It had only been fourteen years previously that 350 Ionian triremes, outnumbered almost two to one by the Persian fleet, had rowed out to battle off Lade and had been annihilated. The great wheels of time, turning as they did at the command of he who dwelt beyond them, were clearly turning with a quite merciless precision. Once already a fractious alliance of Greek squadrons had disintegrated amid treachery and backstabbing when confronted by the might of the Persian fleet – and now, with a mysterious but no doubt divinely sanctioned symmetry history appeared destined to repeat itself.
Nevertheless, at the council of war Xerxes held to determine the best way to proceed, there were dissenting voices. Demaratus – the exiled Spartan king, now serving Xerxes as an advisor – urged an amphibious operation directly against Lacedaemon. He knew that the Spartans would never come to the rescue of any other Greeks when the flames of war were licking at their heartland. True enough, but storms and enemy action had depleted the imperial fleet so much that the detachment of a small task force from the main body would leave the Greek forces a match for either. And so the proposal was duly vetoed. So, too, was the proposal of the formidable Queen Artemisia of Helicarnassus. She argued strongly against the plan to force a second Lade. Why risk battle when Athens was already captured and autumn was closing in? Better to maintain the standoff and leave the Greek squadrons either to starve or to scatter and sail for home?
A shrewd military analysis, but political considerations forced its veto. For the Great King of Kings to spend a winter on the edge of the world was out of the question. A burned and devastated Athens was no place to administer the world. Having graced the expedition with his divine presence, it was now imperative for him to finish the war before the campaign season drew to a close. Only a thumping victory before the weather turned would do.
Luckily for the Persians, the fractious Greeks were behaving true to form. Just as hatreds, doubts, and fears had riven the Ionian squadrons off Lade, so now off Salamis the Greek fleet was on the verge of a similar implosion. Already, on the day of the burning of the Acropolis, several crews had stampeded and attempted to raise sail for home. That evening, the high command had been fragmented into several factions, Peloponnesians against Athenians and their supporters. Adeimantus had sneered at Themistocles as a refugee and warned him, when he spoke out of turn, that “athletes who start the race before the signal is given are whipped.” “Yes,” the Athenian admiral replied, “and those who are left behind never win the crown.” Only by threatening to withdraw the Athenian contingent from the fleet and sail at once for southern Italy and permanent exile had Themistocles kept the squabbling contingents in line. But would the Peloponnesians, panicking at being bottled up in the straits, and not willing to die to defend Athenian territory, call his bluff?
Persian spy chiefs , with more than sixty years’ experience exploiting Greek rivalries, resolved to find out. A task force of 30,000 Persian troops was duly dispatched to take the road to the Isthmus (Since the road to Megara had been destroyed, and the Isthmus itself solidly fortified across its six-mile length and manned by all the remaining Grecian land forces, there was little chance of them actually storming the gates to the Peloponnese, but the naval forces hardly knew that). The Persians, war songs echoing for miles, weapons glittering brightly, moved out of Athens, rounded Mount Aigeleos, and followed the Sacred Way towards Eleusis.
The reaction in the Greek camp was consternation. As evening drew on and mutinous sailors were already besieging their captains with demands to sail to defend the Isthmus, the King of Kings tightened the screws even further. Squadrons of the imperial navy bore down on Salamis and began to patrol directly off the island, menacing the escape routes with a perfect show of leisure. The Peloponnesians were on the verge of revolt, “For there they were, stranded on Salamis, obliged to fight in defence of Athenian territory, and certain, if they were defeated, to find themselves trapped and blockaded on an island. And all the while their own country stood defenceless, even as the barbarians, marching through the night, were advancing directly on the Peloponnese.”
Of course, the Persian spies, the undisputed masters of their art, without rival in all the world, were never one to leave things to chance. Even as they menaced the southern contingents with shows of force and shadow-boxing, they also played on the suspicions and fears of those depending on the Peloponnesians for their own defense: The Athenians. Cyrus, and Darius after him, had always bestowed rich rewards on top-level traitors and moles in enemy organizations. What rewards then, for the man who had it within his power to betray the whole Greek fleet, and win the war, and the West itself, for the Great King? Splendid and glorious beyond compare, no doubt.
We are nowhere openly told of contacts between Themistocles and Persian agents. The murk that veils treachery and espionage is often impenetrable – and all the more so at a remove of two and a half thousand years. But during the Salamis campaign there was waged a war in the darkness, a shadowy counterpart to the din and crash of battle, fought with whispers and rumors and Persian gold, that has no rival.
It came to pass that that September evening, 480 BC, shortly after the Persian squadrons returned from patrol back to Phalerum, while the Greek admirals, still at loggerheads, were digesting the day’s events, a tiny boat slipped out of the dark ranks of the Athenian fleet and made its way across the straits. Its passenger, as soon as he set foot on dry land, was hurried into presence of Persian high command – for this was Sicinnus, the most trusted slave of Themistocles. He came to deliver a message of utmost urgency: The Greeks, the slave reported, were planning a getaway that very night. “Only block their escape,” came the advice from Themistocles, “and you will have a perfect chance of success.” Themistocles was revolted at his allies’ pusillanimity, and in full sympathy with Xerxes, earnestly longing for a Persian victory, according to Sicinnus’s report. A dazzling intelligence coup indeed.
Persian contingency plans, long prepared in the event of just such an opportunity, were swiftly put into motion. The fleet was ordered to ready itself for battle. Rising from their suppers, oarsmen hurried to their benches, marines to their stations on deck. “Crew cheered crew, all the way down the battle-line,” and then, rank after rank, pulling out of Phalerum into the waiting darkness, they took to sea. No more cheering now – the slightest sound might alert the enemy. Instead, gliding silently through the darkness, they took up their stations of the battle to come in the morning. The Egyptians, two hundred triremes strong, had been ordered to circle the island of Salamis and stopper the narrow bottleneck of the western straits, there to catch Greeks fleeing the slaughter. Others, serrying into ranks of three, took up their positions before the straits – the mighty Phoenician fleet in the place of honor on the right, the unreliable Carians and Cilician squadrons in the center, and the skilled Ionian sailors anchoring the left. Finally, setting the seal on preparations, four hundred soldiers were stationed on an island in the middle of the straits, Psyttaleia, there to slaughter all the men swept onto the island’s rocks during the next day’s battle. Nothing had been left to chance. Not a single Greek would be permitted to escape the Great King’s trap.
Meanwhile, Sicinnus slipped back across to Salamis. On the island the Greek admirals were still quarrelling furiously. At some point towards midnight, it is said, Themistocles slipped out of the meeting. He found waiting for him, cloaked in shadows, an old enemy. Areistides, “the Just,” summoned back from exile along with all the victims of ostracism, had come with a devastating report. He had seen the ominous silhouettes of the Persian fleet slipping out and closing its net around the island. Themistocles urged him to take the news to the other admirals – “for if I report it, they will think that I am making it up.”
The report of Areistides finally settled the debate. The Peloponnesians were trapped – there was nowhere to run. They would fight in the morning or they would die. And so the Greek fleet, too, began to make its preparations for the morning. Dawn rose on a day as fateful as any in human history – and found every squadron in the Greek fleet primed and nerved for battle.
Over the straits, men later remembered, there glimmered a sudden sense of something uncanny, an almost palpable heightening of intensity in the morning light. To the Athenian marines, before they took their places on deck, Themistocles delivered a speech that would long be remembered, “urging them to consider all that was best in human affairs, and all that was worst – and to choose the former.” Yet not even these words raised as much hairs on the back of men’s necks as did the assurance – one that swept the entire fleet – that the sons of gods who in ancient times had been the guardians of the rocks and groves and temples of Greece were present among them. Men would later speak of seeing phantoms and even ghostly serpents gliding on the surface of water, and of hearing unearthly battle cries echoing around the straits.
To be sure, there had been something eerie in the air for days. Even Greeks in the Great King’s train appear to have sensed that the heavens might be turning against their master. Walking through the deserted fields of Eleusis before the battle, Demaratus had seen a cloud of dust billowing up from the coast road. The Athenian collaborator had heard the faint singing coming from the Sacred Way as the “iacche”: The chant of joy raised every September by worshippers as they journeyed to Eleusis. Only now it was heading out to sea – towards Salamis.
Demaratus had urged him to keep the tale silent, as Xerxes, so close to victory, would brook no hints of defeatism. He intended to watch the destruction of the troublesome Greeks personally. And so, even as Greek oarsmen were hurrying to their benches, the Great King, followed by his train of generals, officials, slaves and flunkeys was riding in his chariot past the southern spur of Mount Aigaleos and on to a rocky spur that overlooked “sea-born Salamis.” Below him, as the sun rose behind the King of Kings, an awesome panorama unfolded: The straits, Salamis, the gulf beyond them, and in the far distance, the Isthmus.
But no fleeing Greek fleet. Instead, stretched in a glittering array from one end of the straits to the other, the forces of free Greece had formed a battle line to confront the mighty navy of the King of Kings.
But wait, what was this? A squadron of Greek triremes, 40 strong, was speeding north, away from the battle line. Xerxes must have smiled in satisfaction. And so the rout was already starting. The signal to enter the straits must have come, and so the Persians rowed forward to finish the job, and end the war, that had started so long ago in Sardis, once and for all.
But the Corinthians – for it was their ships who were speeding north – were not fleeing. They were merely checking to ensure the Egyptian squadron was not yet approaching, for they had turned around and were already making their way back to the south. And the rest of the Greek fleet?
As the great mass of the Persian fleet rounded the southern spur of Salamis and flowed around the island of Psyttaleia, they did so without being able to see their enemy. The angle of the channel, and the spray and early autumn mist, precluded it. But then, rising from ahead of them as the front ranks closed in on the Greek positions, they heard singing, and the paean soared to such a pitch that “a high echo rolled back in answer from the island crags.” The Persian admirals might have begun to doubt – but no turning back now, not under the very eye of the Great King himself. But the certainty would have spread from captain to captain that the Great King had, for once, been well and truly conned. The Greek triremes, far from fleeing at their approach, were instead marshaled in a great battle line of their own along the bays and spurs of the island, from the Athenians on the northernmost wing to the Aeginetans in the south; and the ram of every ship was pointed directly at the Persian fleet.
“Eleutheria!” With this cry, “free speech!”, a single ship darted forth from the Athenian ranks and slammed into one of the Phoenician triremes. For a moment, everything was still. Then the battle exploded as both sides charged.
The Athenian vessels bore names such as “Democracy,” “Independence,” and “Free Speech”. They recognized that they were fighting to defend such concepts from being crushed in their infancy under the royal high heels of an Oriental monarchy. No such names were to be found among the Persian fleet.
It is a mark of the confusion of the engagement that even the identity of the first ship to engage the barbarians was later vigorously debated: Both the Athenians and the Aeginetans laid claim to the honor. It was impossible to know the truth – the two contigents were fighting at opposite ends of a line that stretched for upward of a mile, and no one in the straits ever had a view of the whole panorama of the battle. No wonder, then, that memories of that grim and glorious day should have been, not of strategy, nor of the performance of rival squadrons, nor of the ebb and flow of the fighting, but rather of stirring deeds and individual heroism, exploits that shone all the more brightly for being set against a backdrop of such clamor and carnage and chaos.
Most celebrated of all was an Athenian, Ameinias, from the village of Pallene. In the shock of the battle’s opening, he dared to attack the flagship of the Phoenician fleet, a towering vessel commanded by one of the Great King’s own brothers. The royal admiral, infuriated at the impudence of the tiny Athenian vessel, had ordered missiles to be showered on his assailant while he himself led a boarding party – but he was skewered by Ameinias as he made the jump, and was pitched overboard. More ambiguous was the performance of the second of the Great King’s commanders to be attacked by the mad Athenian – none other than Artemisia of Helicarnassus, the same whose own advice, had it been taken, would have avoided the battle altogether. Seeing Ameinias bearing down on her, and panicking, she found her escape route blocked by the trireme of her own vassals – and so resorted to the startling expedient of ramming it herself. Ameinias, presuming that the queen had deserted the Persian cause, moved off in search of other prey. And so it was that Artemisia made her escape.
Such was the confusion of the fighting that Xerxes, also watching the same incident, had presumed her to be ramming an enemy trireme. “My men have turned into women,” Xerxes is reported to have cried as Artemisia’s warship pulled away from the wreckage of its victim, “and my women into men!”
His bitterness was understandable – for the Great King, far more clearly than any of his admirals embroiled in the fighting below, could take in the full sweep of the catastrophe unfolding in the straits. He could see how his crack Phoenician squadrons, left leaderless by the death of their admiral, and hemmed in by the Athenians, were being progressively driven back onto shore, or else put into open flight. He could see Areistides the Just, leading behind him the few remaining Athenian hoplites, landing on Psyttaleia. Slingers, archers, and heavily armored marines poured off of allied vessels and won bloody payback for the cornering of the Spartans at Thermopylae. Led by Areistides, the Greeks “dashed over their enemies like a roaring wave, their voices raised in a single cry, hacking at the limbs of the wretched men until the life had been butchered out of every last one.”
Xerxes could mark the chaos that was the result of his squadrons’ attempts to withdraw, as rank after rank of them began to lose formation, cramping one another in the narrows, “their bronze rams smashing the sides of their neighbors, shearing off whole banks of oars.” He could observe in mounting disbelief how a deadly wedge of Greek ships, massing inward, was splitting his fleet in two, leaving the Phoenicians on the right wing of the battle line trapped like tuna fish in a net, there to be speared or battered or hacked to death. And he could reflect, perhaps, that the order to engage the Greeks had been his own.
Unsurprisingly, the Great King, in his vexation, was testy in the extreme with any survivors of the fiasco. When a group of bedraggled Phoenician captains, attempting to excuse the loss of their ships, had tried to lay the blame on Artemisia and accuse her of treachery, he had them decapitated on the spot. Naturally, it was out of the question for the King of Kings to accept any blame in the disaster, and the Phoenicians, now that their strength had been shattered on the rocks below his throne, could serve him well enough as scapegoats.
Midday turned to afternoon, and the Persians began to be swept out of the straits. Perhaps half of those triremes that had entered the deadly channel had survived to leave it. Behind them, harrying them as they lurched and limped desperately back to Phalerum, came the Greeks, pursuing them across those same open waters that the Great King had planned to stage his ambush and win the mastery of Greece the night before.
And so ended the attempt of the Great King to force the straits of Salamis.
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