The Battle of Salamis
As the enemy ships formed a battle line on the far shore in the early morning, they observed no panic among the Greek ships beached along the island’s shore. The Greek sailors and marines ate a hearty breakfast and assembled before their commanders. After breakfast, a paean, the sacred Greek war cry, rang out from the sailors on the island, echoing off the bare rocks of Mt. Aegaleos on the far shore and rebounding off the crags of Salamis behind them.[2]
The men marched down to their ships. The first sailor on the ship set down a ladder on either side of the stern, for the men to ascend. The rowers entered the ships in even rows so as not to unbalance the long, narrow vessels. They took their assigned seats in the three rows of benches, and as the boatswains broke out the oars, the rowers ran them out and secured them with leather thongs. Once the rowers were all in place, one hundred and seventy for each trireme, with their oars set, the marines entered the boat. They wore the gear of a hoplite, a heavy infantryman: a breastplate on the torso, greaves on the shins, a helmet that covered the head except for narrow slits at the eyes, topped by a horsehair crest. Each was armed with a sword, javelins, and a heavy round shield. Four archers on each ship stood prepared to shoot arrows at the enemy troops. At the stern a steersman took the tillers of twin rudders. A piper adjusted a double pipe to his head with thongs to play a rhythmic tune to set the cadence for the rowers. A captain gave the orders.
When the Greek ships were manned and ready, a blast from a bugle, the salpinx, launched the Greek attack.[ii] Signals were passed, the pipers piped, and the oars dipped into the water. The Athenians set out, one-hundred and eighty ships strong forming the left wing, while the Spartans took the place of honor on the right wing. Other allies occupied the middle. Though the ships could carry a heavy mainmast and a broad rectangular sail on a yardarm for sailing, this gear would only impede a ship in battle. In combat, a trireme would at most carry a light foremast for a small “boat sail”; the sail would be hoisted up only for flight in case of a defeat.[3] The precision maneuvers of war were done with oars. The combined allied fleet totaled some three hundred and eighty warships. The combined Persian fleet numbered about six hundred and fifty, but only a fraction could squeeze into the bay through the narrow straits from their anchorage on the east.[4]
On the Persian side, the Phoenicians were arrayed opposite the Athenians, while the Ionian Greeks, now Persian subjects, formed up opposite the Spartans.[5] Themistocles knew that the enemy sailors had been rowing all night to carry out their surprise encirclement of the island and entry into the bay. They were desperately hungry and thirsty and already exhausted, and the battle had not even begun.
On the far shore, King Xerxes had a throne placed on the foot of Mt. Aegaleos and prepared to watch the slaughter as his ships overwhelmed the Greek rebels.[6] He was surrounded by his retinue of retainers, generals, scribes, messengers, and concubines, as if for a staged entertainment. The Greek fleet advanced into the no-man’s land much as a Greek army advanced: shoulder to shoulder in a battle line. The Persian fleet also advanced, well aware that behind them the Great King was watching from his throne, and the penalty for a bad performance was death.
On the island shore in the crowd with Socrates’ father Sophroniscus, stood a veteran of the battle of Marathon, where ten years earlier the Athenians had repelled a Persian raiding force on the north shore of the Attic peninsula. He was a poet who had already won the prize in Athens for presenting the best tragedy. Aeschylus would be the only eyewitness to leave an account—in verse—of the battle.[7]
The Athenian ships moved smoothly, their oars in perfect time, falling into the water in unison, lifting up, feathering, rotating, falling again, with hardly a splash as they drove forward the galleys. They were triremes, galleys with three banks of oars, two below and one above, mounted on an outrigger. Long and low, the line of the trireme’s hull ended in a bowpost that rose straight out of the water and curved gracefully into a circle at the top. Below the bowpost a bronze ram shaped like an animal snout cut through the water at sea-level. Eyes were painted on either side of the ram to give the ship “sight.” The ship was steered by twin rudders situated just forward of the sternpost, which rose high and curved forward, topped by a figurehead unique to each ship.
The Greek ships rowed deliberately towards the enemy, closing the gap between battle lines. Before they reached ramming distance, at a signal they backed water and reversed direction towards their own shore. The enemy ships now advanced into the no-man’s land and approached the shoreline of the island. Promontories on either side of the beach jutted into the bay, protecting the Greek flanks from encirclement: this is exactly where the Greeks wanted to fight.
It was mid-morning now, when the breeze began to blow from the sea onto the mainland, pushing from the Greeks’ backs into the face of the Persian forces. The Phoenician galleys with their high gunwales and lofty sterns began to labor against the wind, struggling to keep from turning their beams to the advancing Greeks. Gaps opened in the battle line.
Suddenly the Athenian captain Aminias charged an exposed Phoenician galley. Accelerating to ramming speed, his trireme came in hard toward the hull of the unprotected Persian ship. The bronze ram slammed at the waterline, splintering planks, throwing the enemy rowers off their thwarts, knocking oars into the water. Sea poured through the gaping hole as the whole stern assembly broke off. The Greek ship backed water but couldn’t free itself from the Phoenician ship.[8] On the decks marines from both sides hurled javelins, while bowmen fired arrows against their foes.
The wounded ship began to list, and the enemy marines could no longer hold their positions. Shouts and screams erupted from the lower decks as men fled the rising waters. They leaped into the sea, desperately looking for oars and flotsam to cling to. Most Greek sailors and marines could swim, but most barbarians could not, so many would not survive the sinking of their ships.[9]
Emboldened by the attack, other Athenian ships closed in for the kill.
Throughout the line, ship now attacked ship. Some locked together as marines fought land battles on the decks, while other encounters were decided by the bronze rams. As the day wore on it became clear that the Greeks were winning most of the encounters; the Persian ships were being pushed back by the Greek onslaught and the prevailing wind towards shoal water and in the constricted field of battle colliding with their own ships. The ships in the Persian front were trying to retreat, but there was nowhere to retreat to. Suddenly the defeat turned into a rout, and the rout into a panic.[10]
King Xerxes watched in horror as ship after ship of his invincible armada sank or was disabled and captured. The Persian ships began to race for the narrow outlet to the east. In the bottleneck, ships crashed into each other or became entangled, as one fleeing vessel would unintentionally sheer off the oars of another with its ram, leaving the damaged ship without blades on the damaged side and able only to spin in a circle.
The water in the bay ran red with blood. The straits filled with floating wrecks that now could be captured by the Greek victors and later refitted for their own use. A Greek fleet from the nearby island of Aegina, approaching Salamis, ambushed the fleeing Persian ships and destroyed many of them.[11] The surviving ships of the demoralized Persian fleet took refuge in the Athenian port of Phaleron they still occupied.
By evening the outcome was assured by a Greek attack on the small island Psyttaleia, which lay in the narrow outlet on the east. The Persians had occupied it the night before so that they could use it as a base in the battle. Now that the island was cut off from Persian reinforcements, the Athenian exile Aristides landed Greek soldiers there who slaughtered the Persian garrison.
According to Aeschylus, Xerxes cried out and rent his robes as he observed the slaughter on Psyttaleia, which, according to Plutarch, took three of his nephews.[12] The king also lost his half-brother, an admiral, in the naval action.
[2].Aeschylus Persians 395.
[3]. Casson 1959: 97; 1994, 67; Morrison and Coates 1986: 176-179.
[4]. Strauss 2004: 26.
[5].Herodotus 8.85.
[6].Herodotus 8.90.4; Aeschylus Persians 466-67.
[7].Aeschylus The Persians, staged in the City Dionysia, 472 BC.
[8].Herodotus 8.84.1; Aeschylus Persians 409-11.
[9].Herodotus 8.89.
[10].Herodotus 8.89.2, 8.91; Aeschylus Persians 413-20.
[11].Herodotus 8.91.
[12].Herodotus 8.76.1, 8.95; Aeschylus Persians 468; Plutarch Aristides 9.1-2.