Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (4 page)

Persian religion was not as absolutist as that in Egypt, inasmuch as the Achaemenids were agents of Ahura Mazda, not divinities per se. Nevertheless, royal power was predicated on divine right, imperial edict was considered a holy act. So the constant refrain of all the Achaemenid kings: “Of me is Ahura Mazda, of Ahura Mazda am I.” When Alexander the Great learned to say the same thing, even his most loyal Macedonian lords began to plot either an assassination, a coup, or a return to Greece. Conquered peoples of the Persian Empire like the Babylonians and Jews, however, at the local level were left to worship their own gods. Because
no
culture in the conquered East had any tradition of religion apart from politics, or even embraced the ideal of religious diversity, most Persian subjects considered the Achaemenid religious-political relationship not any different from their own—and if anything more tolerant.

That being said, there were numerous castes of holy men who not only enjoyed political power as agents of the king but also sought vast acreages to support their work. The official white-robed magi were employed by the monarchy as religious auditors in public ceremony and to ensure the piety of the imperial subjects. Mathematics and astronomy were advanced, but ultimately they were subject to religious scrutiny and used to promote in a religious context the arts of divination and prophesy. A humanist such as Protagoras (“Man is the measure of all things”) or an atheist rationalist like Anaxagoras (“Whatever has life, both the greater and smaller, Mind
[nous]
controls them all . . . whatsoever things are now and will be, Mind arranged them all”) could not have prospered under the Achaemenids. Such freethinking in Persia might arise only through imperial laxity; and if discovered, was subject to immediate imperial censure. The classical Greeks were as pious as the Persians, but when conservative citizens rallied to rid their cities of atheistic provocateurs, they first sought a majority decree of the people or at least the semblance of an open jury trial.

If in the past Western historians have relied on Greek authors such as Aeschylus, Herodotus, Xenophon, Euripides, Isocrates, and Plato to form stereotypes of the Persians as decadent, effete, corrupt, and under the spell of eunuchs and harems, the careful examination of imperial archives and inscriptions of the Achaemenids should warn us of going too far in the other direction. The Persian army at Salamis was not decadent or effeminate, but it did constitute a complete alternate universe to almost everything Greek. All things considered, there was no polis to the east. Achaemenid Persia—like Ottoman Turkey or Montezuma’s Aztecs—was a vast two-tiered society in which millions were ruled by autocrats, audited by theocrats, and coerced by generals.

THE PERSIAN WARS AND THE STRATEGY OF SALAMIS

Salamis was the central battle in the clash of two entirely different cultures, one enormous, wealthy, and imperial, the other small, poor, and decentralized. The former drew its enormous strength from the taxes, manpower, and obedience that a centralized palatial culture can so well command; the latter from the spontaneity, innovation, and initiative that arise exclusively in small, autonomous, and free communities of lifelong peers. Contemporary Greeks themselves believed that the course of the war hinged mostly on a question of absolute values. Indeed, they felt that it centered on their own strange idea of freedom, or
eleutheria—
theirs to keep, Xerxes’ to take away. The war, in their eyes, would hinge on how much freedom was worth and to what degree it might trump the king’s enormous advantages in numbers, material wealth, and military experience. The Athenian infantry’s triumph at Marathon ten years earlier had stopped cold a local punitive incursion of Darius, a day’s battle that saw Athens and Plataea alone of the Greeks take the field. That initial Persian expeditionary force of 490 B.C. was not large by later standards—at most, 30,000 invading troops were pitted against a little more than 10,000 Greeks. Xerxes’ subsequent muster, however, was a different army altogether.

Thermopylae, fought a decade after Marathon, was a terrible defeat— for all its gallantry and talk of Greek freedom perhaps the greatest loss in the entire history of Panhellenic operations, and one of the few times in history that an Asian army would defeat a Western force inside Europe. The nearly simultaneous sea battle at Artemesium was at best a strategic Greek withdrawal. Hence in any analysis of why the Greeks won the Persian Wars, we are left to consider just two pivotal victories of the conflict: Salamis and the subsequent infantry battle of Plataea.

Mycale (August 479 B.C.), fought off the coast of Ionia in Asia Minor at or near the same time as Plataea, inaugurates a period of Greek expansion into the Aegean Sea, rather than a defense of the Greek mainland per se. Yet Mycale was made possible only by the previous victory at Salamis. Plataea, fought in a small valley about ten miles south of Thebes almost a year after the Greeks’ mastery at Salamis, was a magnificent Greek triumph, resulting in the destruction of the remaining Persian infantry in the field and marking the final expulsion of the king’s infantry forces from Greece. Yet that landmark battle—where the Persian general Mardonius was killed and most of the remaining Persians slaughtered or scattered— is understood only in the context of the tactical, strategic, and spiritual success of Salamis the September before, which energized the Greeks to press on with the war. The Persians subsequently at Plataea fought
without
King Xerxes, his battered armada, and some of his best Persian troops that had either drowned at Salamis or fled to Persian territory nearly a year earlier after their naval defeat at Salamis. There was to be no supporting Persian fleet for Mardonius’s infantry off the coast of eastern Boeotia—it was either on the bottom of the channel off Salamis or long ago dispersed to the East. In addition, there may have been more Greek infantry at Plataea—60,000 to 70,000 hoplites and even more light-armed soldiers—than would ever marshal in one army again in Greek history. Herodotus believed that more than 110,000 combined Hellenic troops were present. Thus, the Persians fought at Plataea in summer 479 B.C. as a recently defeated force, without the overwhelming numerical superiority they enjoyed at Salamis and without their king and his enormous fleet. At Plataea the invaders could not be reinforced by sea or land. The confident Greeks, in contrast, poured into the small Boeotian plain, convinced that their Persian enemies were retreating from Attica, demoralized from their defeat at Salamis, and abandoned by their political and military leadership.

How different things were a year earlier at Salamis—and how difficult it is for the historian to fathom how the Greeks could actually win! After evacuating its countryside and city, Athens—its recently constructed fleet of two hundred ships composed two-thirds of the Greek contingent—was unwilling to fight one yard farther south. Nearly all the Athenian citizenry had been evacuated to Salamis proper, Aegina, and Troezen in the Argolid. Thus, by September 480 B.C., for the Greeks to sail a league southward from the Saronic Gulf was to abandon the civilian refugees of Attica to Xerxes’ troops—and essentially to end the idea of Athens itself, which, with the loss of Salamis, would now not possess a single inch of native soil. “If you do not do these things [fight at Salamis],” Themistocles warned his Peloponnesian allies, “then we quite directly shall take up our households and sail over to Siris in Italy, a place which has been ours from ancient times, and at which the oracles inform us that we should plant a colony. And the rest of you, bereft of allies such as ourselves, will have reason to remember my words” (Herodotus 8.62.). Greeks fought for freedom in the Persian Wars, but there were astute statesmen in the Peloponnese who wished to postpone their final reckoning with Xerxes until there was no other alternative and all the other city-states had first committed their final reserves in this war of Armageddon.

At Salamis most Greeks conceded that the further participation of the refugee Athenians, still the greatest sea power of the Panhellenic alliance, hinged on two prerequisites: a sea battle had to be fought immediately after the evacuation of Attica; and it had to be waged in a buffer area between the Persians and the Athenians’ own vulnerable civilian population. A September fight off Salamis was thus the only alternative to retain Athenian participation, the foundation of the alliance. All other northern Greeks, with minor exceptions, had not only ceased resistance once their homeland was overwhelmed, but actually supplied troops to Xerxes’ cause. The Athenians’ threat to sail westward was no mere boast: they really did mean to abandon the cause should the southern Greeks not make a last effort of resistance at Salamis.

The Athenians had evacuated Athens because their 10,000 or so heavy hoplite infantrymen were no match for the Persian horde. After the slaughter at Thermopylae, no Panhellenic hoplite force was eager to marshal in the Attic plain to defend the city against a victorious enemy that was now swelled by the medizing Greeks of Thessaly and Boeotia. True, most Greeks still preferred decisive battle, preferably on land and by heavy infantry. Yet until Xerxes’ source of naval support, transport, and allied help were ruined, any such spectacular last stand would result in little more than Greek slaughter. One heroic catastrophe at Thermopylae for the time was enough, as most realized that the existence of an enormous Persian enemy fleet meant that any Greek land defense might be outflanked from the rear through naval landings, while the loss of Boeotia had eliminated a pool of some of the best hoplites on the Greek mainland.

There are no large islands immediately off the Hellenic coast to the south between Salamis and the Isthmus of Corinth or along the northeastern shore of the Argolid peninsula, no narrows and inlets that might have offered the outnumbered and “heavier” Greek fleet a confined channel in which to offset the numerical advantage of the Persian armada. Even if the Athenians could have been convinced to fight to the south of Salamis, transporting those refugees on Aegina and Salamis southward to join those already on Troezen, there were only two alternatives of defense: a sea battle in the open waters to the south or a suicidal land defense behind the fortifications of the isthmus itself. Neither offered hope of victory.

Herodotus reports a pre-battle speech of Themistocles to his fellow Greek generals in which he rejected such a naval engagement off Corinth: “If you engage the enemy at the Isthmus, you will fight in open waters, where it is to our worst advantage, inasmuch as our ships are heavier and less in number. In addition, you will forfeit Salamis, Megara, and Aegina even if we should win a victory there” (8.60). In contrast, Themistocles added, a fight at Salamis would ensure that the Peloponnesians might keep their enemies from approaching the isthmus and thus far distant from their own territory. Victory at Salamis might save Athens and the Peloponnese. Even success at the isthmus was too late for the salvation of Attica. The key for the Greek defense was to keep its two greatest powers, Athens and Sparta, free and committed to the spirit of Panhellenic defense.

Mnesiphilius, an Athenian, earlier warned Themistocles that, should the Greeks not fight at Salamis, there was little chance that the Panhellenic armada would again assemble as one fleet, even at the isthmus. “Everyone,” Mnesiphilius predicted, “will withdraw to their own city-states, and neither Eurybiades nor any other man will be able to hold them together, but rather the armada will break apart” (8.57). For that reason, Herodotus makes Queen Artemisia, one of Xerxes’ admirals, although fearing for her life, advise the Persians to avoid Salamis, wait, and gradually head south by land to the isthmus. She argued that a sea battle at Salamis would be the only chance of the squabbling Greeks to unite against the Persian onslaught.

The Peloponnesian Greeks in Herodotus’s account clung stubbornly to the idea of a land defense and hurriedly fortified the isthmus while their admirals debated at Salamis. Not only would the Athenian fleet have been reluctant to participate in such an effort of the Peloponnesian states when Athens’s entire population was enslaved—its ships would have been of little value anyway in a fight behind fortifications—but there is good reason, as Herodotus foresaw, that it would have failed. An intact Persian fleet could easily have landed troops to the rear of the Greek army all along the coast of the Peloponnese.

The last hope of Hellenic civilization to defeat an empire twenty times larger than its own was to force a battle at Salamis. The slim chance of victory lay largely with the strategic and tactical genius of Themistocles and the courage and audacity of the sailors of the Panhellenic fleet, who were fighting for their freedom and the survival of their families. The problem, however, was that throughout 480 B.C. free Greeks continued to bicker, vote, and threaten each other, all the while unfree Persians annexed even more of their native soil. This freedom to explore different strategies, debate tactics, and listen to complaints of the sailors was raucous and not pretty, but when the battle itself got under way, the Greeks, not the Persians, had at last discovered the best way to fight in the strait of Salamis.

THE BATTLE

Had the 40,000 who drowned and their surviving comrades succeeded, there would have been no autonomous Greece, and Western civilization itself would have been aborted in its two-century infancy. Salamis was in some sense the last chance of the fragile Greek coalition to thwart Xerxes before his forces occupied the nearby Peloponnese and so completed his final conquest of mainland Greece. The Athenian refugees were huddled in makeshift quarters on the nearby islands of Salamis and Aegina and on the coast of the Argolid, their very culture on the verge of extinction. We must remember that when Salamis was fought, the Athenians had already lost their homeland. The battle was an effort not to save, but to reclaim, their ancestral ground.

Unfortunately, our ancient sources—the historian Herodotus and the playwright Aeschylus, along with much later accounts from the Roman period by Plutarch, Diodorus, and Nepos—tell us almost nothing about the battle itself, but do suggest that the reconstituted Greek fleet was outnumbered by at least two to one and perhaps by as much as three or even four to one. We are not sure how many ships were present at the battle on either side—given prior losses at the first sea battle at Artemesium weeks earlier and subsequent reinforcements—but there must have been somewhere between 300 and 370 Greek vessels arrayed against a Persian armada of well over 600 warships. Both Aeschylus and Herodotus, however, were certain that the Persian armada was even larger, numbering more than 1,000 ships and 200,000 seamen. If they are correct, Salamis involved the greatest number of combatants in any one engagement in the entire history of naval warfare.

Most ancient observers also remark that the sailors of the Greek fleet were less experienced than those of the imperial Persian flotilla, who were veteran rowers from Phoenicia, Egypt, Asia Minor, Cyprus, and Greece itself. The Athenian armada was scarcely three years old, its more than two hundred ships built suddenly on the advice of Themistocles, who presciently feared fellow Greek—or Persian—naval aggrandizement. With far fewer ships and less seaworthy craft, the Panhellenic armada’s only hope, as Themistocles saw, was to draw the Persian fleet into the narrows between the island and the mainland. There the invaders would not have room to maneuver fully, and thus would lose their advantage in manpower and maritime experience, as spirited Greek rowers repeatedly rammed their triremes into the multicultural armada. Herodotus also speaks of the Greek ships as “heavier”
(baruteras).
This does not necessarily mean that the Hellenic triremes were better designed and more seaworthy. Some scholars suggest that Herodotus meant that the Greek vessels were either waterlogged, built of unseasoned timber, or larger and less elegant—both less maneuverable and more difficult to sink—than the Persians’. Whatever the case, it was clearly in the Greeks’ interest
not
to go out to sea, where they would be not only outnumbered but outmaneuvered.

The Persians, perhaps fooled by a ruse of Themistocles, believed that the Athenians were retreating southward via the Bay of Eleusis through the strait of Megara. In response, they split and thus weakened their forces by sending ships to block the passages off both the northern and the western shores of Salamis as well. The king’s fleet attacked just before dawn, rowing forward in three lines against the Greeks’ two. Very quickly, the armada became disorganized due to the Greek ramming and the confusion of having too many ships in such confined waters. The uniformity of the Greek crews, their superior discipline and greater morale help explain why they were able to strike the enemy ships repeatedly without being boarded by the numerically superior enemy. The experienced Egyptian contingent did not fight at all, but waited in vain far to the north for an expected Greek retreat off Megara.

Themistocles led the Panhellenic attack in his own trireme. His sheer magnetism and threats had kept the Greeks together after the Persian occupation of everything north of the isthmus; and his secret but false promises to the Persian king of a surrender on the eve of the battle had fooled Xerxes about the real Greek intent. Throughout our brief ancient descriptions, the common theme is Greek discipline in attack—ships advancing in order, as crews methodically rowed, backwatered, and rammed on command—contrasted with the chaos and disruption of the Persians, who vainly tried to board Greek triremes at random and kill the crews.

The battle was fought for perhaps eight hours sometime between September 20 and 30, but most likely September 28. By nightfall the ships of the Persian fleet were either sunk or scattered, and the morale of the invading sailors lost. Most enemy vessels were sunk by ramming, as Greek triremes darted in and out of the clumsy Persian formations, which quickly became dispersed as national contingents operated independently and in their own interests. Although in theory the fleeing enemy still outnumbered the Greek fleet, the Persian armada was no longer battleworthy, with more than 100,000 imperial sailors killed, wounded, missing, dispersed, or sailing back across the Aegean.

Within a few days Xerxes himself began the march home to the Hellespont, accompanied by 60,000 infantry and leaving behind his surrogate commander, Mardonius, with a still enormous force to continue the struggle on the Greek mainland the next year. The Greeks immediately declared victory. The Athenians would soon reoccupy Attica. Within a few months Hellenic infantrymen streamed in from all over Greece to finish off the Persian land forces, who had retired northward into Boeotia and were camped at Plataea.