The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (3 page)

At the final meeting of the allied generals before the battle to discuss the collective defense of what was left of Greece, one Greek delegate bellowed that the Athenian Themistocles simply had no legitimacy. After all, the admiral no longer had a city to represent—a charge similar to that often leveled later in the Second World War against General Charles de Gaulle and his orphaned “free” French forces based in London. The Peloponnesian and island allies saw little point in fighting for an abandoned city. The overall allied fleet commander, the exasperated Spartan Eurybiades, in a furious debate with Themistocles, next threatened to physically strike some sense into the stubborn, cityless admiral. No matter: Themistocles supposedly screamed back, “Strike—but listen!”
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Eurybiades, who had far fewer ships under his own command, heard out the desperate Themistocles. He was well aware that the Athenian infantry generals who had won the battle of Marathon a decade earlier—Miltiades, Callimachus, Aristides—were either dead, exiled, or without the expertise to conduct naval operations. Likewise, his pessimistic Spartan antagonist also knew that three earlier efforts to stop the Persians to the north had all failed. Why should Salamis end any differently?

In fairness to the Spartan, Eurybiades’ reluctance to join Themistocles in fighting here had a certain logic. King Leonidas had been killed at Thermopylae just a few days earlier. No more than twenty-two city-states remained to fight at Salamis, out of a near one thousand Greek poleis that had been free a few months earlier. Moreover, the Greek fleet depended largely on the contributions of just three key powers, the city-states Aegina, Corinth, and Athens. Their ships made up well over half the armada. It seemed wiser for those admirals to retreat back to the Isthmus at Corinth and not to waste precious triremes far from home in defense of a lost city.

Worse still for the coalition, the sea powers Corinth and Aegina were historical rivals—and yet both in turn were enemies of the Athenians. The Greeks may have claimed that they were united by a common language, religion, and culture, the Persians divided by dozens of tongues and races; but Xerxes presided over a coercive empire whose obedient subjects understood the wages of dissent, while the Greek generals represented dozens of autonomous and bickering political entities who faced no punishment should they quit the alliance and go home. Even in their moment of crisis, these free spirits seemed to have hated each other almost as much as they did the Persians, who had thousands of subservient Ionian Greeks in their service and had shown singular brilliance in bringing such a huge force from Asia and battering away the Greek resistance at Tempe, Thermopylae, and Artemisium while peeling off more city-states to their own side than were left with the resistance. Indeed, until Salamis, Xerxes had conducted one of the most successful invasions in history.

The so-called Themistocles Herm is a Roman stone copy of a lost Greek bronze sculpture. Unlike most idealized classical statuary, the bust captures Themistocles more as a general than a near-god (presently in the Ostia Museum, Ostia, Italy). Photo courtesy of the Ostia Museum.

The salvation of Athenian civilization rested solely on the vision of a single firebrand, one who was widely despised, often considered a half-breed foreigner, an uncouth commoner as well, who had previously failed twice up north at Tempe and Artemisium to stop Xerxes’ advance.
How well Themistocles argued to the Greek admirals determined whether tens of thousands would live, die, or become permanent refugees or slaves in the next few days. Themistocles had earlier gone up and down the shores of Salamis rallying the terrified Athenians, and he kept assuring Eurybiades and the demoralized Greeks that they must fight at Salamis to save Hellenic civilization and could assuredly win. He pointed out that the Greeks could do more than just repel the enemy armada and reclaim the Greek mainland. By defeating the Persian navy, they could trap Xerxes’ land forces and then bring the war back home to Persian shores. Yet to the Peloponnesians, who were about ready to sail away from Salamis, this vision of the stateless Themistocles seemed unhinged—or perhaps typical of a lowborn scoundrel who throve in the shouting matches of Athenian democracy but otherwise had no clue how to stop an enemy fleet three times the size of their own.

But was Themistocles wrong? He alone of the generals amid the panic fathomed enemy weaknesses that were numerous. He might have failed to save his city from burning, but he still had confidence he could save what was left of Athens from the Persians. Hundreds of thousands of Xerxes’ army were far from home. The year was waning. And they were getting farther each day from the supply bases in Asia Minor and northern Greece—even as the army was forced to leave ever more garrisons to the rear to ensure conquered Greeks stayed conquered. The tipping point, when the overreaching attackers could be attacked, would be right here at Salamis.

Yet the general, and admiral of the fleet, was no wild-eyed blowhard. In his midforties, Themistocles had already fought at Marathon (490), conducted a successful retreat from the failed defense line at Tempe (480), battled the larger enemy fleet to a draw at Artemisium, and this year marshaled the largest Athenian fleet in the city’s history. In the last decade, he knew enough of war with Persians to have good cause for his confidence that logistics favored the Greeks.

Nearly a hundred supply ships had to arrive daily just to feed the Persian horde—given that the summer’s grain crops of Attica, and those of most of Greece, were long ago harvested. The Persian fleet was without permanent safe harbors as the autumn storm season loomed and already had suffered terribly from the gales at Artemisium. In late September, rowing on the Aegean began to turn unpredictable. Rough seas were a greater danger to the Persians than to Greek triremes that still had home ports down the coast. Moreover, most of the king’s contingents were not
Persian. Those subject states—many of them Greek-speaking—for all their present obedience, still hated the Persian king as much as they did the free Greeks of the mainland. The Persian navy proved even more motley than the polyglot imperial army.
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Most of Xerxes’ army also had been camped out on campaign for months. For all its pretense of being an imperial expeditionary force, the various allies would be squabbling more the farther they were from home, while the remaining Greeks grew more desperate for unity the more their homeland shrank in size. So far from joining the general despondency, Themistocles was supremely confident in the Greeks’ chances at Salamis. Few others shared his optimism, perhaps because a Spartan king had just fallen in battle at Thermopylae, partly because unlike Themistocles they still had homes to retreat to for a while longer.

Themistocles was soon to be proved right: The Spartan supreme commander Eurybiades did not realize it, but the Persian fleet had, except for a sortie to nearby Megara, already reached its furthest penetration into Europe. Logistics, morale, and numbers had already conspired against Xerxes—even as he boasted of his conquest of Greece. Yet right now in late September 480, few could see it: “We Athenians have given up, it is true, our houses and city walls,” Themistocles declared to the wavering generals, “because we did not choose to become enslaved for the sake of things that have no life or soul. But what we still possess is the greatest city in all Greece—our two hundred warships that are ready now to defend you—if you are still willing to be saved by them.”

Themistocles talked of Greeks being “saved,” not merely “defended,” as if a victory at Salamis would be a turning point after which Xerxes could not win. Note further that Themistocles was making a novel argument to his fellow Greeks: A city-state was people, not just a place or buildings. His “free” Athenians with their two hundred ships were very much a polis still, even if the Acropolis was blackened with fire. As long as there were thousands of scattered but free-spirited Athenians willing to fight for their liberty, so Themistocles argued, there was most certainly still an Athens.
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What swung the argument to make a stand at Salamis was not just the logic of Themistocles, but also unexpected help from his former rival, the conservative statesman Aristides, who advised the other Greek generals to fight. The latter’s reputation for sobriety reassured the Greeks that the Persians really were in their ships and poised for attack—and they believed the prior messages from Themistocles himself that they
had better attack before the Greeks got away. Time had run out. Only three choices were left—fight, flee, or surrender.
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What brought the squabbling Greeks to Salamis was a decadelong Persian effort to destroy Hellenic freedom—and the efforts of Athenians to stop Darius and his son, Xerxes.

The original east/west rivalry ostensibly started over the breakaway attempt of the subjugated Greek city-states on the coast of Asia Minor that had begun in earnest in 499–498—nearly twenty years before the invasion of Xerxes. By 493, after the failure of the Asiatic Greeks to end Persian occupation and win their freedom from King Darius, the emboldened Persians quickly sought to settle accounts and punish the Athenians. The latter had sent ships and hoplites to their rebellious Ionian cousins across the Aegean. Apparently they had hoped in vain thereby to preempt Persian aggrandizement abroad before it reached their own shores.

Despite an initial failure in northern Greece (492), Darius, father of Xerxes, began his payback in earnest in 490. The king dispatched his generals Datis and Artaphernes with a second expeditionary force of some twenty-five or thirty thousand sailors and infantry. They headed on a beeline path across the sea to the Greek mainland. After easily conquering the island of Naxos, the Persians took the key city of Eretria on the large nearby island of Euboea. Next, sometime in mid-August 490, they landed on the nearby eastern coast of Attica itself—at the plain of Marathon, just twenty-six miles from Athens.

There, in a set-piece infantry battle, the outnumbered but more heavily armed phalanx of the Athenians and their allies, the Plataeans, won a crushing victory over the lighter-clad Persians. The invaders had foolishly advanced into the enclosed plain of Marathon without much, if any, cavalry support. Despite numeric superiority, the Persians were trapped by the Athenians’ double envelopment. Although the Athenian and Plataean defenders may have been outnumbered three to one, and had to weaken their center to envelop the larger Persian wings, the combined Greek forces nonetheless managed to kill more than 6,400 of the enemy—at a loss of only 192 dead. Heavy armor—and the discipline, solidarity, and columnar tactics of Greeks fighting for their own soil—
had smashed apart the more loosely deployed, lighter-clad Asian invaders and explained the one-sided slaughter.

Most Greeks, especially the conveniently late-arriving Spartans, who had stayed away from the battle, still could not quite fathom how just two Greek city-states had turned back an invasion by the enormous Persian Empire. Athenian spearmen had ensured the land victory and then immediately made a miraculous march to circumvent an amphibious landing. Amid the general euphoria, Sparta, the preeminent land power in Greece, was nowhere to be found.
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Themistocles himself had fought at Marathon. Indeed, he had been elected a magistrate, or archon, of the young democracy three years before the battle (493), allowing him a preeminent position in establishing Athenian foreign policy. But credit for the victory properly belonged to the more conservative Miltiades, commander in chief of the Greek infantry generals on the day of the fighting. Before the Greeks ran out to battle, Miltiades drew up the risky but winning strategy of weakening the Greek center to draw in and envelop on the wings the charging Persian mass—achieving the elusive dream of a double envelopment by a numerically weaker force. That moment of victory was immortalized later in a vast painting on the monumental Stoa Poikile at the north end of the Athenian Agora. The playwright Aeschylus’ brother died in this glorious Marathon moment. Aeschylus himself chose to record his own service at the battle—not his fame as a dramatist—in his own epitaph.

A national myth quickly arose that an entire Persian invasion had been thwarted by a single glorious battle won by better men in bronze. The Athenians were determined never to forget who had won the battle—and how. For each Athenian or Plataean infantryman who fell, thirty-three Persians perished. Both the infantry victory and the subsequent famous twenty-six-mile march to beat the Persian fleet back to Athens were immortalized as proof of the nobility of traditional agrarian Athenian hoplites, and the proper way for landowning citizens to defend their city. No walls or ships were needed to save Athens from Persian hordes; courage, not just numbers, mattered. That Athenian hoplites had won without the crack troops of Sparta made the victory all the sweeter. Sixty years later the comic poet Aristophanes could still talk nostalgically of the old breed of
Marathonomachoi,
“the Marathon
fighters,” whose courage over the subsequent century was never later surpassed. In short, Marathon became a sort of shorthand for the triumph of traditional values, and was thought to have put an end to the Persian danger.
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