Chapter IX: Salamis (3)

In the Greek fleet the Athenians were on the left wing. According to Herodotus, the Lacedæmonians were on the right; but according to Diodorus they were on the left, with the Athenians; while the Æginetans and Megareans were on the right. In this conflict of evidence, it is almost certain that Herodotus is correct. The fact that the Lacedæmonian admiral was in command renders it extremely unlikely that his contingent occupied any but a prominent place in the line; and certain details of the fight indicate that the Æginetans were in the immediate neighbourhood of the Athenians. It will thus be seen that the most prominent contingents on either side were severally opposed to one another in the battle, the Phœnicians on the Persian right facing the Athenians on the Greek left, and the Ionian Greeks on the Persian left facing the Lacedæmonians on the Greek right.

The two fleets seem to have moved forward almost simultaneously. As the evidence with regard to the nature of their movements is somewhat complicated, it may be well for the sake of clearness to deal with them separately.

Before beginning the advance the Persian fleet was drawn up in three lines; but a totally different formation was adopted when the movement developed. Describing its appearance as it entered into the narrow part of the strait, Æschylus speaks of it as coming forward in a “stream” (ῥεῦμα) which can only refer to some formation in column, or in something resembling a column. Diodorus supplies the connecting link between the two formations, when he says that the Persians when they came into the strait were compelled to withdraw some ships from the line.

If the chart of the strait at this point be examined it will be seen that, after passing Psyttaleia and Kynosura, it not only narrows but turns westward at right angles. The Persian fleet had consequently to accomplish a difficult manœuvre of a double kind, namely, (1) to reduce the length of their front; (2) to execute a wheeling movement to the left, of which their extreme left wing would form the pivot. In so far as can be judged, what took place is this: their right, and possibly their centre, having reduced their front, passed through the strait east of Psyttaleia in some sort of column formation, and then wheeled to the left, in order to turn the corner of the strait, while their left wing marked time, as it were, in the strait west of Psyttaleia. This wing would be hidden from the Greek fleet by the somewhat lofty rock promontory of Kynosura. But the right wing passing east of Psyttaleia would come almost immediately into sight of the Greeks, and would present to them the appearance of the “stream,” which Æschylus describes.[167]

#THE BATTLE SCENE.#

The scene, as the two great fleets advanced towards one another, must have been one of the most magnificent that the world has ever beheld. History can hardly present a parallel of a naval battle on such a scale as Salamis, and none in which fleets so large have operated in so comparatively confined a space. More than 2000 years later the neighbouring Corinthian gulf was destined to be the scene of a sea-fight which in respect to grandeur and picturesqueness most nearly compared with Salamis, when Don John of Austria defeated the great Turkish fleet in those waters which, later on in this very century, were to be rendered famous by the exploits of the great Athenian admiral, Phormio. In both these battles East and West met in one momentous struggle for the command of the Mediterranean—it may perhaps be said, without exaggeration, for the command of the world; and in both the East succumbed so completely that the loser never recovered from his defeat. Impossible as it is fully to realize the scenic effect of a battle of such ancient date, the records of which are imperfect, yet the area in which it was fought is so comparatively limited and so well defined, that the traveller who visits the spot can bring the scene before his imagination in a way that is impossible in the case of most of the great fights of ancient history. Would that the description of it had come down to the modern world from the pen of him who described the last fight in the great harbour of Syracuse! It was indeed a theme for that consummate artist in language. The impression of magnitude which it conveyed to those who were present at it is evident from the pages of Æschylus, where it is described with the grand breadth of description due to a battle of giants. But the historian wants more than he finds therein, and cannot but feel that Thucydides was born half a century too late.

The evolution which the Persian fleet had to carry out in turning the corner of the strait would have been difficult under any circumstances. It was further complicated by the contraction of the sea-room after the corner was turned, and by the necessity of performing it in face of a powerful hostile fleet within comparatively short striking-distance. The result was that the fleet fell into considerable confusion. Both Æschylus and Diodorus testify to this fact. Diodorus’ account is peculiarly consistent with the topographical circumstances. He says, as has been already noticed, that the Persians in their advance at first retained their order, having plenty of sea-room; but when they came to the strait, they were compelled to withdraw some ships from the line, and fell into much confusion.

The two fleets were now advancing rapidly to one another in the straight channel which runs east from old Salamis town, of which the breadth is 2000 yards. The actual fairway may be about one mile in width. How much space in the line was allowed for each trireme in battle array is not known, but it can hardly have been less than sixty feet; and, if so, the utmost number of vessels in the front line of either fleet cannot have exceeded ninety. Both fleets must, therefore, in this order of advance, have been several lines deep. There was no room for the employment of sea-tactics other than those of the most simple kind. The battle must have been, from beginning to end, a terrific _mêlée_ whose issue would depend on which side could fight hardest and longest. The circumstances were all in favour of the smaller fleet. #THE BEGINNING OF THE ENGAGEMENT.# The mere superiority of the armament of its crews must have gone far to decide the result, and the superior weight of its individual vessels could not fail to tell in a combat of this character. With the knowledge born after the event, it is easy to see that, despite the inferiority of numbers, the better-armed fleet must have won the day, provided both fought with equal courage; and the obstinate nature of the battle shows that, though there may have been cases of cowardice on both sides, these were the exception and not the rule.

The actual point of contact was, in all probability, north of and towards the eastern extremity of Kynosura.

From certain details which are given of the fighting, there is strong reason to suppose that the two fleets, either from accident or from design, were in somewhat of an _échelon_ formation when the first contact took place. Æschylus says that the Greek right wing led the advance, and the remainder came behind. Æschylus also mentions,—and his evidence on this point is supported by Herodotus,—that a Greek ship began the battle by attacking a Phœnician vessel. As the Phœnicians were on the Persian right, this ship must have belonged to the Athenian contingent, which was on the Greek left; and the only conclusion to be drawn is that, despite the advanced position of the Greek right, the first contact took place at the opposite end of their line; in other words, the Persian right must have been equally in advance of its line. The wheeling movement, as has been already noticed, had not been a success; and the Persian vessels which passed through the strait east of Psyttaleia, and were on the outside of the movement, had got in front of that part of the fleet which passed through the channel west of the island, and formed its pivot. It is not difficult to perceive what happened. This eastern column of vessels had entered the narrow part of the strait with so extended a front that, when the time came for the western column to wheel into line with them, it was left with too little sea-room; confusion resulted, and the advance of the Persian left wing was delayed. It was no doubt the undue advance of the Persian right wing which made it possible for the Æginetans later in the battle to fall upon the flank of the Phœnician contingent, and to deal the blow which was subsequently regarded as being largely responsible for the victory won.

Of the picturesque individual details of the fight, but few, considering its magnitude, have survived; and these are not in all cases reliable. Yet it is possible, by comparing and collating the fragmentary accounts of the actual fighting, to form a general idea of its most striking incidents.

There must have been many interested spectators of the action, Persians on the mainland and Athenians on Salamis island, whose feelings must have resembled those with which the Athenian army watched the battle in the great harbour of Syracuse more than sixty years later.

Not the least interested of these onlookers was the Great King himself. Surrounded by some of his chief men, he took his seat on the slope of Mount Ægaleos above the Herakleion, at a point where, as Plutarch remarks, the strait contracts in width. He must have been stationed nearly opposite the town of Salamis, among the sparse pinewood which probably then, as now, covered the slope of the hill.

The Persian fleet seems never to have had the opportunity of recovering from the confusion into which it had fallen in the course of the wheeling movement. Plutarch says, moreover, that Themistocles had reckoned that the early morning wind, which raises somewhat of a sea in the strait, would have a much greater effect on the Persian vessels, which stood high in the water, than on the Greek ships. It would tend to throw them into confusion, and thus expose their sides to the charge of the hostile ships.[168]

#THE BATTLE.#

Of the form which the confusion took during the battle there is also a certain amount of evidence. The front ranks of the Persian fleet seem to have been unduly compressed laterally by the want of sea-room, and longitudinally by the pressure of the ranks behind them; and the confusion due to the last of these causes was much increased when the beaten front ranks were forced back on those in rear. The fleet was, indeed, too large for the area of operations, and some of the rearmost ranks apparently, at a period in the battle which is not mentioned, finding they could take no part in the fighting, backed and retreated to the broader part of the strait, south of Psyttaleia. The consequence was, according to Plutarch, that in the actual fighting the Greek fleet was not outnumbered; and this may well have been the case.

Little is said of the actual mode of attack employed by the Greek vessels; but, from what is related, it would appear that the Athenians, at any rate, relying on the structural strength of their ships, sought to ram the enemy with their bows, or shaved close past them in such a way as to break the oars on one side, and so render their vessels unmanageable for the time being; and then made use of the opportunity to charge them sideways at their weakest point. Boarding must, in many cases, have been resorted to, for which purpose thirty-six men were available on the Attic vessels,—eighteen marines, fourteen hoplites, and four bowmen. It may be conjectured that any superiority which the Persians possessed in respect to their crews would consist in the higher efficiency of their bowmen, javelinmen, and such-like. It was, therefore, greatly to the advantage of the Greeks that the confinement of the space within which the action was fought rendered it not merely possible, but necessary, to fight at close quarters. A rather striking instance of what might have happened in this respect, had the sea-room been somewhat greater, is related by Herodotus. It occurred probably towards the end of the battle, when the retreat of many of the Persian ships had relieved the pressure in the strait. A Samothracian craft had sunk or waterlogged an Athenian ship, when it was itself attacked and waterlogged by an Æginetan vessel. Despite its desperate situation, its crew, which consisted of javelinmen, cleared the decks of its assailant with their weapons, and took the ship. The whole incident runs so entirely counter to Herodotus’ marked partiality for the Athenians, that there is no reason to doubt its genuineness.

The main credit for the victory seems to have been adjudged by the verdict of contemporaries to the Athenians and Æginetans. Such, at any rate, is the account of the historian; and the juxtaposition in the roll of fame of these two Hellenic peoples, who were destined to play an antagonistic part in the history of the next twenty years, renders it probable that the verdict of the men of their own time has been faithfully reported. There is little reason to doubt that their contingents were next to one another in the Greek line of battle, and were partners in a brilliant tactical movement against that portion of the Persian fleet which was regarded as most formidable, the Phœnician contingent. Herodotus says that while the Athenians pressed hard on the vessels opposed to them, the Æginetans, presumably on the flank, assailed these vessels of the Persian fleet as they were driven back. It is, perhaps, possible to understand what happened on this wing of the battle. It has been shown that in the course of the advance the Phœnician contingent on the Persian right must have got in front of the rest of the line, a mistake which it would be impossible to correct in a battle fought under circumstances such as those which prevailed at Salamis. Its flank would then be exposed to attack while it was assailed in front, and of this the Æginetans seem to have taken advantage.

It was in the course of this engagement that the Æginetans captured that vessel of the enemy which had a few weeks before captured their own scouting vessel on the Thessalian coast.

#THE IONIANS AT SALAMIS.#

Meanwhile the battle in the centre and on the Greek right had been of a much more even character. It may even be suspected that in that part the combat was going against the Greeks. The Greek right was indeed in the same disadvantageous position as the Persian right: it had advanced in front of the rest of the line, and thus exposed itself to a flank attack. No details of what actually took place are extant; but it is evident that the Ionian Greeks who opposed the Lacedæmonians and other Greek contingents at this part of the line did not get the worst of it. Herodotus who, as he shows in the account of the Ionian revolt, had a very low opinion of Ionian courage and intelligence, was not in the least likely to praise them unless the praise was notoriously merited. He not merely admits, but says with some emphasis, that they showed no lack of courage and determination in the fight. Any effect which Themistocles’ appeal might have had upon them was certainly not apparent at Salamis. He further remarks that he knows the names of many of their captains who took Greek vessels, of whom he will only mention the two Samians, Theomestor, who was made by the Persians tyrant of Samos for his services, and Phylakos, who was enrolled on the list of the king’s “benefactors,” and given a grant of much land. These significant statements make it clear that in the early part of the battle, at any rate, the Greek right wing had the worst of the fight. More than that, they suggest a very probable reason for the somewhat surprising courage and determination with which these Ionians fought against their kinsmen. Whatever may have been the feelings of the Ionians in general with regard to their countrymen over sea, their leaders were attached to the Persians by strong ties of self-interest, and formed a philo-Medic party in the Greek cities of the Asian coast.

The ruling powers in these cities depended on the support of the Persian government for the maintenance of their position; and from their ranks and from those of their followers, in all probability, the officers, at any rate, of the Ionian contingent were drawn.

The Persian centre also seems to have at first made a stubborn resistance to the onslaught of the Greeks, and for some time after the Phœnicians and Cyprians had been defeated and driven back, the Cilicians, Pamphylians, and Lycians continued to resist, though assailed by the victorious right wing of the Greeks. But the struggle was too unequal to last; and they, too, were obliged to retreat.

It is evident that the wave of victory advanced from left to right along the Greek line, for now the Athenians, probably aided by the Æginetans, though the latter are not actually mentioned by Diodorus, joined in the attack on the right wing of the Persian fleet. The fight cannot have been very prolonged; the Ionian Greeks were obliged to retire; though, if the silence of history is to be taken as evidence, they did not suffer irreparable loss either in the battle or in the retreat. The mere weight of numbers against them rendered further resistance useless.

The battle must have begun somewhere about seven o’clock in the morning, for it was after dawn when the Greek fleet put out from the station it had occupied during the night. It came to an end in the afternoon, after some seven or eight hours’ fighting, it would seem.

It was presumably in this last battle on the Persian left that Artemisia, that queen of Halikarnassos whose praise Herodotus has already sung, performed the remarkable exploit reported by the historian. There is a somewhat grave irony about the way in which he tells the tale, as though, in spite of his admiration for this lady, he were pointing a moral for those who might regard even the bravest of her sex as rather uncertain allies amid the excitement of a pitched battle. When the Persian fleet was already in disorder, evidently towards the close of the fight,[169] an Attic vessel pursued her ship. As she could not extricate herself in any ordinary fashion, owing to her friends being in the way, she stood not on ceremony, but made a way through her friends by purposely sinking a Kalyndian vessel. #THE MASSACRE ON PSYTTALEIA.# The captain of the Attic ship, unaware that he had a woman to deal with, naturally supposed that he had made a mistake, and had been pursuing a friend instead of a foe, and so allowed the brave but unscrupulous Amazon to escape. He had reason to regret his mistake; for the Athenians, either because they regarded her as a unique acquisition, or her action in commanding a ship against them as a unique piece of impudence, had offered a large reward to any captain who should capture her. Nor, if the whole tale be true, was the Athenian captain the most distinguished victim of the deception caused by her audacity. Xerxes was a spectator of the incident, so Herodotus says, and imagined that the ship she sank was one of the enemy’s vessels. As the rest of his fleet had by this time taken to flight, the incident, by its apparently strong contrast with the bitter circumstances of the moment, called from him the lament, “My men have become women, and my women men.”

It is probable that the Greek pursuit was not carried far, if at all, beyond the channels on either side of Psyttaleia. No information on the subject is given by any of the historians, but the fact that the Persian fleet left the troops on Psyttaleia, some of whom were persons of note, to their fate, indicates that they were not allowed to retire as far as that point unharassed by the victorious Greeks. It may be that each contingent considered it another’s business to rescue these unfortunates, but in any case the two channels must have been in undisputed possession of the Greeks when Aristides carried out what cannot have been the least bloody operation in a battle where the losses on both sides must have been very great. He had, while the battle was in progress, been stationed on what Herodotus calls “the promontory of Salamis,” which would seem to mean that his men had lined the shore of the strait from Salamis town eastward to the extremity of Kynosura, with a view to rendering assistance to such vessels or their crews as might be cast up there during the battle. When the strait was clear of the enemies’ ships, he collected his men, and transported them in boats to Psyttaleia, to attack the Persian garrison of the island. The slaughter must have been grim and great. Only those were spared from whom a heavy ransom might be expected.

No reliable statement survives of the losses in men sustained by either side. Those of the Persians must have been very large, and those of the Greeks in a battle of such a nature, and so prolonged, cannot have been otherwise than severe. Probably the Persian losses were never even approximately known, and, in the confusion of the time, those of the Greeks never accurately ascertained. Herodotus says that many of the Greeks from the disabled vessels escaped by swimming to Salamis, and that the total loss on the Greek side was not very great; but the very circumstances of the battle make the latter statement hardly credible. Among the Persian killed was Ariamnes, the admiral in command, a son of Darius and brother of Xerxes. He seems to have fallen early in the fight; many other prominent Persians shared his fate. Their defeat was not due to cowardice. Herodotus expressly says that they fought better than at Artemisium.

The losses in ships are stated by Diodorus to have been forty on the Greek side, while the Persians lost two hundred, not counting those which were captured with their crews. It is very possible that these numbers represent something like the truth.

After the battle each of the fleets retired to its temporary base of operations, the Persian to Phaleron, the Greek to Salamis.

In each of the two passages in which he mentions the retiring places of the fleets, Herodotus makes incidental statements of considerable historical importance. He describes the Persian retirement as having been “to Phaleron, to the protection of their land-army.” Perhaps he means that this was merely a part of their land-forces, the other having been despatched, as he has already stated, ◆H. viii. 70, _ad fin._◆ on the night preceding the battle, on its march to the Isthmus. But if that be not the case, it would seem as if the march had been countermanded, and the army brought back in consequence of a change of plan.

Speaking of the return of the Greek fleet to Salamis, Herodotus makes it plain that the Greeks were inclined rather to under-estimate than to over-estimate their success in the battle.

#THE CORINTHIANS AT SALAMIS.#

They expected that the king would make a second attack upon them with the ships which still remained to him. To those possessed of knowledge after the event, it may seem strange that the Greeks should ever have entertained this feeling. It would appear as if they had been so stunned by the immensity of the struggle in which they had been engaged, that they were unable rightly to assess the enormous moral damage they had inflicted on the foe.

The details of the battle which are recoverable at the present day indicate clearly that to the Athenians and Æginetans the Greeks owed their victory; and to them indeed their contemporaries awarded the palm.

Of the behaviour of the other individual contingents nothing can be said to be known. Herodotus does, indeed, relate a story, which he expressly states to be of Athenian origin, to the effect that the Corinthians under Adeimantos retired from the Greek line, and began to make their way to the western strait, but were stopped by a mysterious messenger, who announced the victory of the Greeks; whereupon the would-be runaways returned to Salamis. Herodotus evidently places no credence in the tale; nor need the modern world do so. He says, moreover, that its truth was denied by all the other Greeks.

If it had any foundation whatever in fact, it may be that the Corinthian squadron was detached to observe the narrows near the island of St George with a view to guarding against attack from the rear by the Persian contingent which was known to be watching the western strait. As the tale stands, it can only serve as a remarkable example of the extent to which misrepresentation could be carried in Greece under the impulse of the bitter enmities of a later time.

A defeat of such magnitude sustained in the presence of Xerxes himself could not but lead to fierce dissensions among the various contingents of the Persian fleet. The Phœnicians, that trading people which Persia had always treated with marked favour at the expense of their rivals, the Ionian Greeks, had to justify to their master the fact that they had been the first to retire, whereas the Ionians had resisted to the last. If Herodotus is to be believed, ◆H. viii. 90; D. xi. 19.◆ they adopted the bold line of accusing the Greek contingents of cowardice in the fight. This charge, said to have been made while the fight was in progress, was immediately refuted by the gallantry of the Samothracian crew in capturing the Æginetan ship which had disabled their vessel. The accusers were executed; and, if Diodorus’ story be true, the Phœnicians were so alarmed at the prospect of what might happen to them from the angry Xerxes that, after retiring to Phaleron in the afternoon, they fled in a body under cover of night to the Asian coast. As, however, no trace of such a detail is found in any other historian, and their statements are wholly inconsistent with it, it cannot be regarded as serious history.

It was not, perhaps, until after the war was over that the Greeks acquired sufficient perspective to gauge aright the full significance of their victory on this day. It absolutely destroyed the very foundation of the great strategical plan on which the invasion had been conducted—the combined action of the fleet and army.[170] Never, perhaps, has the influence of sea-power been more strikingly exemplified in warfare than in the total reverse of circumstances which resulted from Salamis. Up to this time the naval power of Persia had been supreme in the Ægean and Eastern Mediterranean for many years past; and the attempt which the Ionians had made to break it at Ladé had by the completeness of its failure merely served to establish it on a firmer basis. But from Salamis onward the decline was rapid, and the Persian navy was never again as an unaided unit formidable in the Ægean.

Salamis was also decisive of the war in which it was fought. Having lost the command of the sea, the Persians could not possibly maintain, in a poor country such as Greece, the overwhelming land force with which they had invaded it. The mere question of supplies rendered the rapid withdrawal of the major part of it an imperative necessity. #MARATHON, SALAMIS, AND PLATÆA.# Persia did not, indeed, give up the struggle, but she was obliged to continue it with a force so reduced in numbers that the Greeks were able to match it in fighting, if not in actual numerical strength. Salamis was the turning-point of the war. Platæa was the consummation of Salamis. After Salamis Southern Greece was safe. Mardonius might have maintained himself for some time in the rich lands of Bœotia, he might even have attempted to include that region within the imperial frontier, but he could not have carried on a sustained campaign in the poor districts to the south of the line of Kithæron-Parnes line. The salvation of the North was won at Platæa.

In consideration of the circumstances, is it presumptuous to hazard the opinion that Sir Edward Creasy was not wholly justified in preferring Marathon to Salamis as one of the “fifteen decisive battles of the World”? The decisive battles exemplified in his book are, with the exception of Marathon, chosen apparently as marking the time at which the tide of affairs of world-wide moment definitely turned to an uninterrupted ebb or flow. But they are in nearly every case the outcome of a chain of events extending, in many instances, over a series of preceding years. If the first link in the chain is to be regarded as decisive of the whole series of events, then, perhaps, the choice of Marathon may be justified; but, on the same principle of choice, the decisive battles of the world would have in many cases to be sought for in comparatively obscure engagements. But if, as is the case with most of the instances Sir Edward Creasy adduces, the supreme decisive moment in a great situation is to be taken, then Salamis, not Marathon, is to be chosen in the great Persian war of the first quarter of the fifth century. The actual records of the time conspicuously fail to support the view that from Marathon onward the tide of the struggle with Persia flowed uninterruptedly in favour of the Greeks.