The Battle of Salamis

THE BATTLE OF SALAMIS

THE NAVAL ENCOUNTER THAT SAVED GREECE – AND WESTERN CIVILIZATION

BARRY STRAUSS

SIMON & SCHUSTER       2004

Time Table of Events Relating to the Battle of Salamis, 480 B. C.

May: Xerxes begins to move troops across the Hellespont.

June: Xerxes begins march from the Hellespont to Athens.

Third week of August: Greek men and ships take up positions at Thermopylae and Artemisium.

August 19, full moon: End of the Olympic Games and the Carnea Festival.

August 27-29: Battles of Thermopylae and Artemisium.

September 1: Greek fleet returns from Artemisium and arrives at Phaleron Bay and at Salamis; Persian army begins march southward.

Early September: Peloponnesian armies in full force begin building wall at Isthmus of Corinth.

September 1-6: Evacuation of Athens.

September 4: Persian Fleet moves southward.

September 5: Persian advance guard reaches Attica.

August 31-Setember 20: Persian army conquers Phocis and Boeotia and regroups in Athens.

September 7: Persian fleet reaches Phaleron Bay.

September 21-23: Siege of Athenian Acropolis.

September 23: Persian army takes Athenian Acropolis; Greek war council on Salamis votes for fleet to retreat to Isthmus of Corinth.

Night of September 23-24: Mnesiphilus, Themistocles, and Eurybiades force Greek war council to change plans and remain at Salamis; debate between Themistocles and Adimantus.

Dawn September 24: Earthquake.

Evening September 24: Sicinnus’s mission to the Persians.

Midnight September 24: Persian fleet enters straits of Salamis.

September 25: Battle of Salamis.

End of September: Persians begin to withdraw from Athens.

October 2: Partial eclipse of the sun: Spartan army leaves Isthmus.

An Important Note About the Ships

• The Battle of Salamis was fought with triremes, wooden warships. Triremes could be powered either by oar or by sail, but in battle only oars were used, because speed and maneuverability were everything.
• ‘Trireme’ comes from the Greek triē rēs, which means ‘three-rower’ ship, referring to the three levels of rowers.
• The trireme represents an innovation in shipbuilding, probably dating to the century before Salamis.
• In 480 B.C., the trireme embodied state-of-the-art naval technology in the Mediterranean.
• For two centuries, the trireme would reign supreme as the queen of the seas; Salamis was its greatest battle.
• Triremes were sleek ships, 130 feet long and 18 feet wide, sitting 8½ feet above the waterline.
• The prow was tipped with a ram, a squat wooden structure encased in bronze and armed with three cutting blades in the fore. The ram sat on the waterline and extended about seven feet off the stem.
• The Phoenicians prided themselves on being the greatest sailors in the Mediterranean. The Phoenician ram was long and tapered instead of short and prolonged.
• A Greek trireme under oar would travel at 5 or 6 nautical miles per hour. For short bursts in battle rowers could move a trireme at 9 or 10 nautical miles per hour.
• A trireme was narrow for its length, which made the ship as fragile as it was fast. So trireme fleets avoided open water and hugged the coast. They preferred not to spend the night at sea.
• A trireme usually contained a crew of 200: 170 oarsmen, 10 marines, 4 archers and various seamen. The single most important man was the pilot who could steer a ship to victory.
• Experienced crews used the ram to strike the enemy and then quickly retreated before he could fight back. Inexperienced crews often preferred to board the enemy and have the marines and archers fight it out.
• In the Greek fleet of 480 B.C. each trireme held 10 marines and 4 archers while the Persian fleet carried 40 marines and archers.
• All of the Greek ships were Greek. None of the Persian ships were Persian, being supplied by a subject state, including Phoenicians, Egyptians, Carians, and Greeks.
• Persia was a land power and would try to turn naval battles into land battles at sea.
• The Athenians decided to build heavy ships to counterbalance the Persian fleet’s superiority in numbers and experience. Heavier ships could outperform lighter ships under certain conditions. If Athens could manage to fight under those conditions, it had a chance of prevailing.
• Victory depended in large part on training and toughening the men, on giving them plenty of food, water, and rest on shore. A successful leader had to be as much a coach and psychologist as he was a naval commander.
• It was essential to keep all 170 men rowing in unison – a difficult task.
• At 130 feet long, a trireme was just over twice the length of an 8-oared rowing boat used by today’s athletes, making it very crowded with 200 men aboard.
• It required ingenuity to maintain control of so many men crowded into one ship, and it was even harder to keep order within a fleet of hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men.

 

Prologue: Piraeus

• He was the last Athenian. That is, if a box of bones may be considered an Athenian. Alive, he had been Themistocles, architect of the greatest sea battle ever fought.
• Now his remains were secretly reburied along the shore outside the wall of Piraeus harbor.
• Across the channel from the great man’s bones lay the spot where, fifty years earlier, Themistocles had staked Athen’s very existence on the outcome of a single day: Salamis.
• In these straits in 480 B.C. a battle took place just where Themistocles had planned. An invading Persian armada aimed to add Greece to the greatest empire the world had ever seen.
• If the battle had gone the other way, Greece would have been ruled by kings and queens. One was Xerxes, the Great king of Persia. Another was Artemisia, Queen of Halicarnassus (Bodrum in Turkey, today), a captain-queen, who fought in the thick of combat – one of the very few women in all of recorded history to have commanded ships in battle.
• The Persians had come in overwhelming force by land and sea to punish Athens for having attacked a Persian city in western Anatolia a generation earlier. At least that was the excuse; they really wanted to conquer Greece.
• Three months before the battle of Salamis, the Persians had marched through northern and central Greece, crushed the Spartan army at Thermopylae, fought the Athenian navy to a standstill at Artemisium, and entered Athens in triumph.
• The world had never seen a battle like it. A channel only a mile wide held the fighting men of the three continents of the Old World: Africa, Asia, and Europe.
• 300,000 combatants and civilians were involved in the battle of Salamis, equivalent to about 20 million people today.
• The ships at Salamis were the most important wooden structures in the history of Greece since the Trojan horse.

 

THE ADVANCE

Chapter One: Artemisium

• The cove is lined, at the shores edge, with about 250 triremes, moored stern first. Chief strategist of the Greeks, that man had planned for years for war with Persia, and now his hour had come. That man was Themistocles.
• For three days, from August 27 to 29, Themistocles led the Greek navy in its first test against the much more experienced Persians.
• In three years he had turned Athens from a backwater into the first sea power in Greece, the proud possessor of two hundred triremes. He had built a fleet and hammered out a plan to save the city from the Persian invasion that he saw coming.
• Only a democracy could have put together the manpower – forty thousand men – and the willpower to use them well.
• Themistocles was that rare thing in a democracy, a leader. He had no fear of speaking truths to the people. He was known for his shrewdness and his shock tactics.
• He was brilliant, farsighted, creative, tireless, magnanimous, courageous, and eloquent. He lied, cheated, blustered, and threatened; grabbed credit for other people’s ideas; manipulated religion; took bribes and extorted protection money; served up insult and pursued vendetta; and ended his days in exile, a traitor.
• The Persians were coming, invading Greece in force. It was the latest stage in a war that had already lasted a generation.
• Persia put down the Ionian revolt in 494 B.C. King Darius of Persia sent an armada to invade Athens in 490 B.C. Athenian infantrymen crushed Persia’s soldiers and save the country. Themistocles was one of the Athenians in the line of battle.
• Now, ten years later, the Persians were coming back, this time in massive numbers. The Greeks began their defense in the north with 10,000 men at the Vale of Tempe, a failure of intelligence as there were two other passes close by.
• But Artemisium was a strategist’s triumph. The Greeks could challenge the Persian fleet’s southward advance in either of two directions. The Greeks had 333 warships against the Persian’s 1,327 ships.
• A monster storm reduced the size of the Persian fleet to 927 ships. The Greeks captured 15 triremes and three important commanders.
• Supreme in numbers and speed, the Persians could hardly believe their eyes when they saw the Greeks bearing down on them. Who else but Themistocles could have conceived such a brilliant use of timing, precision, and shock?
• Under careful controlled conditions, the Greeks would be able to test the enemy’s battle skills, especially the diekplous – the use of the ram with soldiers and archers at the ready, and shearing off the oars, crippling the enemy.
• Success came only with experience and the Greeks lacked experience. That first evening at Artemisium marked the debut of the Greek fleet – and it was brilliant.
• The Persians did the obvious thing: they surrounded the Greeks. The Greeks arranged their boats in a defensive circle, prow out. The ships of the two fleets could hardly have been closer to each other. The two fleets would fight in an artificially created narrow space.
• Themistocles had maneuvered the enemy precisely where he wanted it, where Athens’s heavier ships could do the most damage. On deck, the soldiers and archers kept at the ready, careful not to shift position and unbalance the boat.
• Below deck the rowers, arranged on three levels, sat silently on their benches, ears pricked for the piper, whose rhythm their strokes would soon follow.
• Now came Themistocles’ coup. Selected Greek triremes darted out of the circle, went through the loose enemy line, picked off vulnerable Persian triremes either by ramming or shearing off the oars, and escaped.
• Yielding thirty vessels and the brother of King Gorgus, the Persians never knew what hit them.
• The Persians headed back to their base. During the night a violent thunderstorm wrecked 200 more of their fleet. The Greeks attacked again, waiting till the hour was late, destroying more ships.
• On the third day, Persia’s frustrated commanders initiated their own attack. The Greeks kept calm, embarked their ships but kept close to shore where the narrow space worked to their advantage. The Persian ships kept falling afoul of themselves, colliding with one another. Their losses far outnumbered the Greeks’.

 

Chapter Two: Thermopylae

Chapter Three: Athens

Chapter Four: Salamis

• At the end of August the Greeks received news of the disaster at Thermopylae. Twenty-two Greek cities were represented at Salamis, for a total of more than three hundred ships.
• At dawn on September 24, after the council had lasted all night long, an earthquake was felt by land and sea. The Greeks took this as a sign from heaven. Everything depended on what the Persians decided to do.

 

THE TRAP

Chapter Five: Phaleron

• Xerxes the Great King, the King of Kings, the king of the entire earth, did not ordinarily go down to the seashore to visit a naval encampment. But on September 24, he did just that. The Persian fleet had declined from 1,327 triremes to 650. Tens of thousands of men had been lost in storms and battle. But reinforcements had arrived.
• They took up their formations just outside the entrance to Salamis channel, spread over a five-mile-wide waterway. But the Greeks never appeared and at dusk the order was given to return to Phaleron to moor overnight.

 

Chapter Six: From Salamis to Phaleron

• Themistocles sent his trusted slave, Sicinnus, to announce the imminent departure of the Greek fleet and for the Persians to mobilize at once to stop them. They did so, and launched their fleet at nighttime.
• The key to misinformation is telling people what they want to hear. Sinnicus did nothing more than precipitate the timing. At Salamis, the timing was all.

 

Chapter 7: From Phaleron to Salamis

• It was a dangerous mission and difficult technically on a dark and cloudy night.

 

Chapter Eight: Salamis

• For a brief moment, just before dawn on September 25, 480 B.C., the Greeks achieved a unity that had always eluded them. 368 Greek ships with their 62,000 rowers stood ready, moored at Salamis’ shoreline, stern first.
• The narrowness of the straits would leave little leeway for steering error. It was up to the pilots to avoid Persian rams while landing Greek rams in the enemy.
• At daybreak, the outline of the Persian ships across the straits was visible. Themistocles finished his speech resoundingly and gave orders to board the ships.
• The first trick was that the Corinthians raised their sails and fled. The second trick involved winds and waves that only the Greeks knew. The aura blows from the south, beginning between 8.00 and 10:00 A.M., but is preceded by a north wind blowing off the land. The aura was intensified by the narrow Salamis straits.
• Themistocles waited for the aura before he gave the order for the Greek triremes to charge.
• Themistocles had created a clash of a thousand ships precisely where he wanted it, and precisely when. He had arranged the perfect battle. All that remained was to fight it.

THE BATTLE

Chapter Nine: Salamis Straits: Morning

• Surprise is a weapon. The Greeks unleashed the storm of war on an enemy that had expected a drizzle.
• When an army marched into battle or a navy left the harbor to wage war at sea, the men sang the paean. Next the alarmed Persians heard the blaring of trumpets, an unambiguous call to arms. Next came the sound of oars being rowed on command, crisply and in unison.
• The key to trireme battle was maximizing the chance to ram the enemy while minimizing his opportunity to ram back. The fleets came close enough to each other for them to hear the trill of the other’s pipers, keeping time for the oarsmen.
• The Greeks flinched first, rowing backwards while facing the enemy, closing ranks, drawing the Persians in range of the Athenian archers on shore, waiting for the aura to blow.
• An Athenian captain, Aminias, put his ship out to sea again and rammed a Phoenician trireme, giving the Greeks the first kill of the day. But it was too fast and the ram remained stuck in the enemy’s hull.
• Other Greek ships came to Aminias’s defence. The battle had begun with the cacophony of bronze-sheathed wooden rams crashing into wooden oars and ships; the twang of bowstrings and the whiz of arrows; the whirring of javelins; the metallic clang of swords; the cries of the rowing masters; the screams of the dying. At Salamis, all of this was magnified by the echoes of a narrow space ringed by hills.
• The Phoenicians tried to row their agile ships around or through the Athenian line, but the flanks were protected by a protruding headland. In the narrows off Salamis, the Phoenicians’ speed offered them no help.
• In the straits, having more ships turned into a disadvantage. The Phoenicians fell out of order and exposed their sterns. The Greeks charged and charged with the heavy weight of their triremes directed against lighter ships. Within a matter of hours the Phoenician line fell apart completely.
• From his throne at the foot of Mount Aegaleos, Xerxes had a front-row seat at the humiliation of the Phoenician fleet.

 

Chapter Ten: Salamis Straits: Afternoon

• The mighty Iranian arrow, long the favored weapon of shock of Persia’s mounted aristocrats, had been vanquished by the single sweep of the oar. It was a world turned upside down, and the men of Aminias’s ship were in the vanguard of the revolution.
• It was a terrible moment for the grand Persian fleet, the hour of its suffering. More Persians died in the confusion of ships coming and going than at any other time of the battle.
• Some Persians swam to shore, only to be killed by angry Greek soldiers. Many drowned. In that moment of confusion, Aminias homed in on his most extraordinary opponent yet: Artemisia, queen of Halicarnassus.
• Artemisia saw Aminias’s trireme bear down on her ship. With every rapid beat of the trireme’s 170 oars, Artemisia’s doom came closer. But he had her pilot to call on and her outstanding ingenuity. She commanded her pilot to ram one of her fellow Carian ships and sank it.
• Aminias concluded that Artemisia’s ship was a friend after all, probably a Persian ship that had defected. Aminias ordered his pilot to change course and attack another ship. He missed the greatest prize of all – the thousand-drachma reward for taking Artemisia alive.