The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (6 page)

The historian Herodotus and the contemporary playwright Aeschylus, along with much later accounts in Plutarch, Diodorus, and Nepos, believed that the reconstituted Greek fleet was outnumbered by at least two or three to one. In fact, it may have been only one-fourth the size of the Persian fleet. There is no information how many reinforcement ships joined the respective naval forces after the mutual losses from Artemisium, or how many trireme hulls were repaired. But ancient accounts suggest that between Persian replacements and the growing number of “Medizing” Greeks, the enemy was still at least as large as when it had left Persia months earlier.

If some Greeks quietly slipped away from Salamis and headed southward, most stayed. Even after wear and tear on the fleet, and losses at Artemisium, if the Greek fleet did not number 366 triremes exactly, there still may have been well over three hundred Greek vessels at Salamis. They were waiting to take on a Persian armada of at least six hundred warships—although both Herodotus and Aeschylus record that the enemy fleet had been reinforced to more than twelve hundred ships. That huge figure cannot be entirely discounted, although it implies a quarter million Persian seamen to man such an armada. In any case, there may well have been well over two hundred thousand sailors assembled at Salamis, making it one of the largest sea battles in history.
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The Greek fleet, still under the nominal overall command of the Spartan Eurybiades, was less experienced than the imperial Persian flotilla. Greek triremes were heavier and less maneuverable, their crews greener. The king’s armada was composed of various veteran contingents from Phoenicia, Egypt, Asia Minor, Cyprus, and Greece itself. Most of these navies had patrolled the Aegean and Mediterranean for years enforcing the edicts of the Persian Empire. Perhaps more Greek-speaking crews from Ionia and the Aegean would fight on the Persian than on the Hellenic side.

The alliance’s best hope was to draw the Persians into the narrows between Salamis and the Attic mainland. Once there, the more numerous but lighter enemy triremes might prove vulnerable to the heavier, sturdier, and presumably slower Greek ships. Themistocles reasoned that the invaders also might not have enough room to maneuver and utilize all their triremes. Without more open seas, the Persians would lose the advantages of both their numbers and their superior nautical skill.

Surprise—and greater knowledge of currents and contrary winds inside the straits—would also aid the defenders. The unity of the Greeks versus the motley nature of the subject Persian armada, the psychological advantages defenders enjoy over aggressors, the hope that free peoples fight for their own destiny more stoutly than subjects do amid their subservience—all these, at least in Themistocles’ mind, could become force multipliers and so might still trump Persian numbers.
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Various sources also refer to an improbable ruse on the part of Themistocles on the eve of the battle. He secretly sent his own slave Sicinnus on a mission to Xerxes, with a purported warning of an unexpected Greek withdrawal. The Persians might well have swallowed that strange story of Themistocles’ treachery, given the rumors of Greek infighting
and the well-reported Peloponnesian desire to go home. Themistocles’ intention with the trick was threefold: First, he wanted to incite the Persians hastily to deploy and prematurely man their ships in the dark. Second, he hoped to fool them into splitting their larger enemy fleet to cover unnecessarily all the exits from the straits of Salamis. Third, Persian preemption would force reluctant Greek allies to commit to the sea battle and mobilize immediately in the face of the advancing Persian enemy. A fourth result, or so it was also alleged in antiquity, was that Themistocles could later claim that he had tried to do the Persians a favor, if they won, or if in the future he needed exile in a safe place. Apparently, the agreement to stay at Salamis had strengthened the position of Themistocles. In the few hours before battle, he began to exercise tactical authority despite the nominal overall command of Eurybiades.

In response, the Persians, without careful planning, rowed out into the straits of Salamis, just as Themistocles anticipated—but not before dispatching parts of their Egyptian squadrons to block the southern and western entrances to the strait. In short, Xerxes had sent some of their best contingents on a wild-goose chase to ambush a Greek retreat that never came. The result was the Persians could not make full use of their numerical superiority inside the confining narrows of the Salamis strait itself, where the battle was to be fought.
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Xerxes probably attacked just before dawn. As the September morning breeze picked up, the Persian fleet rowed forward in three lines against the Greeks’ two, its captains worried that they “would lose their heads” should the enemy fleet escape. Quickly the attackers became disorganized due to the Greek ramming and the confusion of having too many ships in too-confined waters—and the shocking sight that the Greeks—the Athenians on the left wing, the Spartans on the right—far from fleeing, were heading en masse right toward them. Themistocles himself was at the vanguard of the advancing Greek triremes. Xerxes, in contrast, watched his Persians from afar, purportedly perched on his throne atop nearby Mount Aigaleos on the Attic shore. In the words of the dramatist Aeschylus, “The mass of ships was crowded into the narrows, and none was able to offer help to another.”
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The sea battle was fought all day—most likely sometime between September 20 and 30, 480 B.C., perhaps on the morning of September 25. By nightfall half the Persian fleet was sunk, due both to poor tactics and leadership and to the superior morale and seamanship of the crews of
the Greek triremes, who knew far better the tides and currents of Salamis Bay—and that defeat meant the enslavement of their families watching from the beaches. The surviving Persian fleet headed back to port and made preparations to flee back to Asia Minor before the Greeks demolished their pontoon bridge over the Hellespont.

The morale of the surviving fleet was shattered, despite their collective fear of the outraged king watching from above. The Persians suffered “utter and complete ruin.” Although in theory the surviving defeated enemy still outnumbered the Greek fleet, the Persian armada was neither battleworthy nor eager to reengage the victorious Greek triremes. Perhaps more than eighty thousand imperial sailors were killed, wounded, missing, or dispersed—which would make Salamis the most lethal one-day naval battle in history, more bloody than even an Ecnomus, Lepanto, Trafalgar, Jutland, or Midway.

Ancient accounts record the macabre scene of the human carnage where Persian corpses were “battered by the surf, lifeless, tossed here and there in their cloaks.” And given that most of the Persians could not swim, we should assume the Greeks speared any survivors clinging to the flotsam and jetsam, knocking them beneath the waves—“hitting and hacking them with broken oars and the wreckage of the ships.” Ancient sea battles were usually fought near land, and with triremes that became partially submerged rather than sank outright. Nevertheless, the inability of Persians to swim and the likelihood that many were fully clothed perhaps made their losses much higher than among the Greek allies.
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Within weeks of the defeat, Xerxes left a ruined Athens. He sailed for the Hellespont in panic with survivors of the imperial fleet. A rearguard of sixty thousand infantry accompanied him by land. The king left behind his surrogate commander Mardonius, with a still sizable landed and cavalry force to continue the struggle the next spring and summer. The remaining Persian army quickly retreated northward for the winter through the pastures of Boeotia into northern Greece. The Athenian refugees for a time got back their burned-out city.

Although the Greeks had immediately declared victory after Salamis, a few months later Mardonius returned over the pass from Boeotia to reoccupy Athens. The population again fled, the Persians torching the city a second time. The brilliant victory at Salamis nevertheless did not prevent this subsequent Persian reoccupation. After camping in a deserted and largely ruined Athens, Mardonius then sent the Persians back into Boeotia yet a third time in late summer 479 to prepare for the expected Greek infantry counterattack. After the flight of Xerxes, some seventy thousand reenergized Greeks flocked to Plataea near the mountainous Attic border to finish off Mardonius. There, on a small plain near the Asopos River on the lower slopes of Mount Kithairon, the Greeks crushed the Persians, killed Mardonius, and watched the survivors scatter to the north.

With the storm and losses at Artemisium, and the subsequent naval defeat at Salamis, Xerxes may have lost cumulatively more than nine hundred triremes. Now with Mardonius’ annihilation in Boeotia, perhaps as many as a quarter million Persian imperial infantry and sailors
had perished in Greece. Rarely in the ancient world had so few killed so many. The cultural result was exultation in newfound Greek freedom: “No longer was there a bridle on the speech of mortals, for the people were set free to say what they wished, once the yoke of power was broken.”
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Soon after the Persian defeat at Salamis, Themistocles vanished from accounts of the great campaign of 479 B.C. to mop up the tens of thousands of Persians who were on their own after the flight of Xerxes. Themistocles did not take part in the land battle, and he may well have fallen out of favor with his Athenian allies and his own countrymen, tired of his endless boasting of Salamis and his oversized ego. Instead, he stayed at sea pursuing enemy vessels along the coast of Asia Minor. He did not resurface prominently until the Persian Wars were over. Salamis was Themistocles’ great moment, and when it passed, the war could go on largely without him.
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About twenty years after Salamis, the legendary Themistocles, in his midsixties, was found dead—and in Persian-held Asia Minor, of all places. The rumors flew back across the Aegean that the old man had killed himself. The story went on that he was poisoned with some lethal concoction laced with the blood of a bull. Of course, the illustrious savior of Athens was not supposed to die like this, old, exiled, disgraced, as a would-be satrap no less, in pay to the very Persian Empire that had once sought to destroy his homeland.
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As an Athenian exile five years earlier, Themistocles had been ostracized, fled his native Athens, and earned a bounty on his head and a posse at his heels. The old man without a polis had serially worn out his welcome among a variety of suspicious Greek hosts—at Argos, Corcyra, Epirus, Pydna, Naxos, and Ephesus. Finally only his ex-enemies would welcome him in across the Aegean—the usual dénouement when a maverick had alienated both Athens and Sparta as places of refuge. Of course, many other Greeks of the age had turned traitor and joined the Persians, including the former Spartan kings Demaratus and Pausanias. Nearby Persian Asia Minor served as an ancient version of turn-of-the-century Mexico, the Aegean a sort of Rio Grande, across which prominent Greek outlaws often fled from various posses. Later the Athenian general Alcibiades
served a Persian satrap Tissaphernes. But none of these infamous betrayers were as hallowed a figure in their time as was Themistocles. If nearly all great Greek generals—Miltiades, Pericles, Alcibiades, Epaminondas—given the jealousy inherent in the nature of ancient consensual societies, at one time in their careers were either tried, fined, or exiled, none had experienced quite such acclaim followed by such utter shame.
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While in Asia Minor for the last five years of his life (463–459), Themistocles had played on his former fame and knowledge of the Greeks to curry enough favor with the Persian king to win a well-paid imperial sinecure in Magnesia. King Artaxerxes, the despot who inherited the kingdom, supposedly shouted of the arrival of the self-made Athenian, “I have Themistocles the Athenian! I have Themistocles the Athenian! I have Themistocles the Athenian!” when he heard that the Greek hero had first entered Persian territory voluntarily rather than in chains. Apparently the famous traitor, even if past sixty, was proof to Artaxerxes that the Persians had at last evened the score at Salamis, well aside from the hope that the Persians were expecting to acquire dated Greek intelligence from the old captain.
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In the last year of Themistocles’ exile in Magnesia, amid a new revolt of the Egyptian provinces, the Persians were once again at war with the Greeks—although fighting to hang on to their empire rather than to expand it in the west. In King Artaxerxes’ mind it was probably past time for the refugee Themistocles to repay the king’s five-year hospitality with active resistance against his own countrymen. Themistocles may have balked at that and thus finally killed himself in distress at the thought of joining the enemy. Or was he worn out by the ingratitude of the Athenians and simply could not stomach his rivals back home using the fleet that he created to win continuous glory as it once more carved away at the Persian Empire? It is impossible to know why he killed himself—if he in fact did commit suicide. (The story may have been a later Greek invention to explain Themistocles’ despair over an unfair charge of treason.)