The fourth installment of historical battles.
SALAMIS
23 September 480 b.c.

Forces Engaged
Greek: 370 galleys. Commander: Themistocles.
Persian: Approximately 1,000 galleys. Commander: Xerxes.

Importance
The Persian naval defeat, followed by the military defeat at Plataea, ended the attempt to expand the Persian Empire into Europe and made the Greeks the dominant population in the Mediterranean region and Europe.
Historical Setting
Although Darius’s attempt to invade Greece in 490 b.c. failed, he was not about to allow the Greeks to go unpunished for their earlier aid to rebellious provinces in Ionia. He would have immediately mounted another invasion, but first had to deal with a rebellion in Egypt. Before subduing that revolt, Darius died in 486 b.c., to be succeeded by his son Xerxes. Xerxes finished the job in Egypt and then set about mounting the punitive expedition to Greece. It is impossible to know for sure just how large an expedition it was because contemporary writers are notorious for exaggerating numbers, whether to make their own victory look better or because the Persian juggernaut seemed so immense it had to be the 2.6 million people Herodotus claimed. Then again, if one assumes that this number includes not only soldiers but also all the various support personnel (cooks, clerks, launderers, etc.), then perhaps it is not too outrageous. Herodotus, however, claims that with the support personnel the total number on campaign with Xerxes was more than 5 million. More modern writers (Maurice, Journal of Hellenic Studies, and Munro, The Cambridge Ancient History) place the fighting forces at between 150,000 and 180,000, drawn from all the Persian Empire.
Since their stunning victory in 490 over the Persians at Marathon, the Greeks had not been as focused as the Persians on the upcoming war. Athens, Sparta, and most other poleis (city-states) had returned to their contentious ways and fallen out among themselves. When hearing the news of Xerxes’s oncoming forces in the winter of 481, they finally sublimated their differences by meeting in a pan-Hellenic conference under Spartan leadership at the Isthmus of Corinth. Many of the northern poleis did not send representatives, however. The major point of discussion was where to make their defensive stand. Sparta argued that, because the Peloponnese, the peninsula upon which they lived, was the heart of Greek independence, the stand should be made at the Corinthian isthmus. This, however, would abandon all of northern and central Greece to Persia without a fight, and such a decision might lead to the poleis north of the isthmus defecting to Xerxes in order to save their lands from destruction. If the defense was mounted farther forward, narrow passages at Thermopylae or the Vale of Tempe could be held by a small military force, while the straits between mainland Greece and the island of Euboea offered a narrow body of water where the Persian numeric naval superiority meant little.
When an expedition to the north found too many passes to hold, the force returned to the south, giving the northerners the impression that they were about to be abandoned. To make bad matters worse, when the Greeks consulted the famous Oracle at Delphi for advice, the response was extremely negative: it implied that Athens would be destroyed, but the other poleis would not if they held themselves aloof. A second attempt at consultation was more positive, but also somewhat puzzling. The Athenians were told to defend themselves behind “wooden walls,” which could mean either their city walls or the bulkheads of the ships of the Athenian navy. The second interpretation was the most widely accepted, and an appeal went to the Greek colony of Syracuse for its powerful navy. They could not respond, however, because they were about to be attacked by the Carthaginians of North Africa, possibly under the direction of Xerxes, for he held sway over the Phoenicians who had established the city of Carthage. The Greeks finally decided to mount a northern defense, the Spartans too afraid of having to fight alone at the Isthmus of Corinth.
Meanwhile, Xerxes in the spring of 480 began moving his massive force around the perimeter of the Aegean. He did so by crossing the Hellespont (the straits near modern Istanbul) on two bridges of boats in one of the most massive engineering feats of its day. As Darius had done before him, Xerxes sent heralds into Greece to demand tokens of submission; they received positive responses only in the northernmost city-states. Having passed his force out of Asia Minor and into Europe, the Persian army marched along the coast, with the navy carrying their supplies. They moved around the Aegean rim toward the Greeks awaiting them at Thermopylae and the narrow Euboean Channel.
The Battle
A force of 7,000 to 8,000 led by King Leonidas of Sparta stood at the pass of Thermopylae, a stretch of beach along the Gulf of Malis. Three hundred thirty-three ships blocked the channel through which the Persian ships would have to travel if they were going to continue supplying the army. The Greeks were hoping for the naval battle to be decisive, with the army delayed only as an excuse to force the Persian navy into the narrow waters. The Greeks were fortunate that the Persian fleet ran into a storm and lost 400 warships. Themistocles, commanding the Athenian ships in the fleet, counseled an immediate attack to take advantage of the Persian disaster. The two navies fought two battles, but both were draws. The Greeks retreated, however, upon hearing that the Greeks at Thermopylae had been betrayed and overrun fo With the Persian army on the march, the citizens of Athens decided to abandon the city, leaving only a defensive post on the Acropolis llowing a gallant last stand by King Leonidas and his bodyguard of 300.
With the Persian army on the march, the citizens of Athens decided to abandon the city, leaving only a defensive post on the Acropolis:
they were putting their faith in the wooden walls of the Greek navy. Themistocles led the navy to the narrow waters between the coastline below Athens and the island of Salamis. If the Persians sent ships to sail both directions around Salamis, the Greeks would be bottled up in a very small area, but Themistocles placed his fleet in that dangerous position to tempt the Persians to attack rather than bypass the fleet and march directly for the Spartan defensive position at the Corinthian isthmus. Meanwhile, Xerxes’s army overwhelmed the Acropolis and burned Athens. As the Persian navy approached, dissension among the Greek naval commanders welled up. Eurybiades, the Spartan, was in command even though the Spartan naval contingent was small. Because Sparta commanded the entire defense of Greece, however, a Spartan commanded the fleet. Many ship captains did not want to put themselves into the dangerous position Themistocles counseled, but he prevailed when he threatened to take his Athenian ships (which were the bulk of the entire Greek navy) and leave the rest to their fate. When on the morning of 22 September 480 another challenge to this strategy was mounted, Themistocles gambled even more heavily. He sent a secret message to Xerxes offering to turn traitor in the midst of the battle if the Persian ships would attack. He had no intention of doing this, but it forced Xerxes’s hand as well as forcing the rest of the captains to fight when the Persian fleet came rowing toward them on the morning of 23 September.
Xerxes sent a contingent of 200 Egyptian ships to enter round the west coast of Salamis, blocking a Greek retreat, while the remainder of his ships entered the narrow waters from the east, rowing right into Themistocles’s trap. The Persian fleet of about 1,000 ships had to divide itself to round the island of Psyttaleia to enter the Salamis channel and then they had to round a long peninsula to enter the channel proper, which was way too narrow for their huge numbers to maneuver. The Persian fleet depended on speed and maneuverability, neither of which they now had. The 370 larger and heavier Greek galleys needed only to row forward into the confused Persian fleet, ramming anything and everything in their path. For 7 to 8 hours the sound of shattering wood and the shouts of battle and death rose up to Xerxes, who sat on a throne watching what was supposed to be his naval coup de main. Instead he saw more than half his fleet destroyed while the Greeks suffered the loss of only forty ships.
Results
Although Xerxes stayed in Athens for a few more days and gave the impression that he was going to renew the battle, he was actually making plans for his retreat. Fearful that the Greek navy might chase his remaining ships all the way back to Asia Minor and then destroy his boat bridge, he made plans to withdraw his army from Europe back into his own lands. He left a force of possibly 180,000 under his general Mardonius to finish off the Greek armies. This he did on the advice of Artemesia of Halicarnassus, a queen who not only had provided ships for the Persian invasion but had distinguished herself in battle at both Euboea and Salamis. She told Xerxes that this was the best solution, for if Mardonius was victorious, Xerxes could claim the credit for leaving him in command, but if Mardonius lost, then Xerxes could disavow any fault for the defeat because he had not been personally in command. Indeed, Mardonius did lose the following August at Plataea after attempting to take advantage of the Greeks who were soon squabbling again. He did have some Greek allies with him at the battle, but the 80,000 Greeks under the command of the Spartan general Pausanias proved too disciplined a force for the polyglot Persian army to stand against.
The battles of Salamis and Plataea ended this round of the Greco-Persian wars; for the next 150 years, Greece and Persia fought intermittently, mainly in Ionia, the east coast of Asia Minor populated originally by Greek colonists. From naval, military, and political points of view, the world changed after these battles.
The Persian navy had dominated the eastern Mediterranean for half a century, with the Phoenicians making up the bulk of the navy and the Ionian cities providing both ships and bases. Further, the Phoenician colony of Carthage, as stated earlier, by acting in concert with Persia, extended Persian sway across almost the entire Mediterranean Sea. This was reversed after Salamis. As long as the Persian Empire existed, and it lasted until its defeat by Alexander the Great in 331 b.c., it maintained a navy to be reckoned with, but the Athenian navy was the primary power for decades after the Salamis victory. When the Peloponnesian War broke out between Athens and Sparta in the second half of the fifth century b.c., Sparta dealt with the Persians in order to use their fleet against Athens. Still, the Persian navy was never the same power it had been. Athens came to dominate trade in the eastern Mediterranean, and the Ionian cities were encouraged by the Greek victory and began making trouble for their Persian masters. Maintaining order in Asia Minor became an ongoing problem for the Persians from this time forward.
Militarily, the Greek army had become the best in the world. The heavily armed hoplite, the Greek infantryman with spear, armor, and discipline, became the standard by which other soldiers were measured. The phalanx in which he fought was the formation that dominated the battlefield until the Roman Empire adapted and modified it into the cohort. Indeed, from this point forward, Greek soldiers and formations were used by the Persians, who hired Greek mercenaries in large numbers to fight their wars in Asia. With the hoplites, Philip of Macedon controlled Greece, and his son Alexander built an empire that reached India.
The greatest change came politically and socially. Many commentators point to Salamis and Plataea as the turning point in all of European history, the point at which Europe became a culture based on Greek civilization and not a vassal of Eastern emperors. Fuller (A Military History of the Western World, vol. 1, p. 52) states that these two battles “stand like the pillars of the temple of the ages supporting the architecture of western history.” Durant (The Life of Greece, p. 242) describes the Greek victory as the most momentous “in European history, for it made Europe possible. It won for western civilization the opportunity to develop its own … political institutions, free from the dictation of Oriental kings. It won for Greece a clear road for the first great experiment in liberty; it preserved the Greek mind for three centuries from the enervating mysticism of the East, and secured for Greek enterprise full freedom of the sea.” Thus, the basis of western political institutions, philosophies, and sciences comes from Greece; little is done today, or even conceived of, that the Greeks did not ponder upon more than two millennia past.
Had the Persians prevailed, they might well have spread their empire deep into Europe. If they had been able to maintain some sort of order in Greece itself (a tall order to be sure) and drawn on Greek soldiers to supplement the already massive and talented Persian army, little in Europe stood in their way. No European population had the organization to mass against them; even the previously successful Scythians may have failed against a reinforced Persian military. A Persian navy carrying the empire’s soldiers across the Mediterranean may even have quelled the nascent power of Rome. The world, indeed, could have been completely different but for Themistocles’s gamble at Salamis.
References:
Burn, A. R. Persia and the Greeks: The Defence of the West, c. 546–478 bc. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984 [1963]; Durant, Will. The Life of Greece. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1939; Fuller, J. F. C. A Military History of the Western World, vol. 1. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1954; Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by Aubrey de Selincourt. Baltimore: Penguin, 1954; Hignet, Charles.