The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (5 page)

The allied congress finally had sent a force of almost ten thousand
Greek hoplites and a large enough naval contingent to transport them up to Thessaly—an impressive number for the city-states, but one that could offer little real resistance to the huge forces of Xerxes. Nonetheless, the advance guard was supposed to keep the Persians from the heartland of Greece to the south. Themistocles was co-commander of this Panhellenic expeditionary force. Yet upon arrival, the position of the Greeks became untenable, even before they marshaled their forces for battle. At this early date, the alliance of mostly central and southern Greek states had embarrassingly little idea of either the geography of Macedon or the planned routes of the Persian invasion.

Themistocles and the Spartan Euainetos had even less inkling that the proposed line of defense up north in the Vale of Tempe between Mount Olympus and Ossa was topographically indefensible in the face of a large invasion. In one of the greatest blunders of the Persian War, the allies had come north unprepared, with too few troops, and too early—and co-led by Themistocles, known for his promotion of sea power rather than proven infantry generalship. The forces were certainly not equipped to camp, wait, and attempt to galvanize the anxious northerners for the expected Persian onslaught. They had no idea of the huge size of Xerxes’ forces advancing toward them. In utter dejection, the humiliated Greek expeditionary force returned to the Isthmus well before the Persians even arrived, ostensibly to plot a second fallback strategy. But time was running out, and morale was almost shot. By late summer the Persians had swept through the north and were ready to enter central Greece through the narrow pass at Thermopylae. Panic set in. All eyes looked to the legendary Spartans to stop the enemy infantry onslaught.
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In response, somehow during their late summer religious festival of the Carneia, the usually blinkered Spartan leadership galvanized the Greek resistance and marshaled an ad hoc second Panhellenic land force of at least seven thousand infantrymen under the Spartan king Leonidas. He was to be accompanied and supplied by a combined fleet of nearly three hundred ships under the command of his fellow Spartan, Eurybiades. Themistocles enjoyed a quasiautonomous command in the fleet of almost two hundred Athenian triremes. He insisted that his Athenians would only serve at sea and not augment the hoplite defense at Thermopylae. The Greeks would have wished ten thousand Spartan hoplites at Thermopylae. But given that they had not shown up at Marathon during the Carneia, they were at least happy for a Spartan king, his royal bodyguard, and some Spartan ships under Eurybiades.

Hundreds of books and articles have been written about the Greek last stand at Thermopylae and the accompanying sea battle at nearby Artemisium. But for all the gripping drama of the heroism at Thermopylae, the gallant sacrifice of Leonidas, and the death of the Spartan three hundred (along with nearly eleven hundred Thespians and Thebans and several hundred other allied Greeks who earlier perished as well), Thermopylae—which, along with the simultaneous naval fighting at Artemisium, marked one of the largest combined engagements in military history—was nevertheless a terrible defeat. The loss of the pass allowed the victorious Persian army a wide-open route into the wealthiest of the Greek city-states. If a Spartan king could not stop Xerxes, who could?
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The successive naval collisions at Artemisium proved only a nominal Greek victory. Themistocles’ aggressive tactics to draw the much larger but wary Persian fleet into the straits of Artemisium, his choice to engage in the unaccustomed late afternoon, and his reliance on speed, maneuver, and ramming, all continued to confound enemy triremes before they could deploy in proper order. By the naval battle’s end, the allies had destroyed far more Persian ships than they lost. Sudden storms caught the retiring Persian fleet without adequate harborage and wrecked dozens more of the surviving triremes.

But despite the damage to the huge Persian armada, in both battle and in rough seas—perhaps six hundred triremes were lost altogether—it was the Greek fleet that retreated southward. Xerxes’ wounded armada followed closely at their rear, supporting the land army that swept aside all opposition. For all Themistocles’ own daring, he had overseen failed efforts in Thessaly and now at Euboia. How could the Greeks save Athens and the Peloponnese when even a naval victory and providential gale proved inadequate to stop the Persian juggernaut?
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A Spartan king was dead, his corpse decapitated and shamed. The holding forces at the pass were wiped out. Their bodies were desecrated and put on display by Xerxes. The survivors of the original seven thousand Greeks of the land defense had scattered in panic to their homes with the news the Persians were not far behind. The victorious, but crippled, allied fleet limped back to the bay at Salamis.

Perhaps half the Greek navy had been damaged or destroyed. Over a hundred triremes needed repair work. More ominously, most of the Greek city-states north of Athens had already joined the Persians or were making arrangements to do so. There would be no second Thermopylae. Xerxes’ forces were growing again, the allies shrinking, and the king was supplying
his forces from the “earth and water”—the symbolic manifestations of Greek surrender—of his Greek hosts. The Athenians’ desperate appeal to field another Panhellenic army to stop the Persians on its northwestern borders with Boeotia was ignored by the Peloponnesian infantry. They preferred to stream home in defeat to the Isthmus.

Any Greek state that was not defended by the retreating alliance either was obliterated or joined the Persians. An overrun Thebes allied with Xerxes, a terrible loss for the remaining free Greeks given its excellent army. The polyglot forces of imperial Persia were more united than the Greeks who shared the same religion, language, and culture. The only debate for the dwindling resistance was over the location and nature of a glorious, but probably doomed, Greek last stand—even as Themistocles led the Athenian contingent home to rally what he almost alone hoped would be a Panhellenic naval response pledged to the salvation of his own city.
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The Athenians, during the Persian rush into Greece, had hastily consulted the oracle at Delphi. Their envoys received various responses from the always politically astute Pythia. The last and most famous reply from the wily priestess offered cryptic advice: First, retreat before the enemy; second, trust in a mysterious “wooden wall”; and third, put hope in a “Holy Salamis” and thereby the promise that the Greeks might at some date “destroy” the Persians.

Dispute broke out over the oracle’s deliberately ambiguous meaning. For those Athenians who did not wish to fight at sea at Salamis—or were too poor or elderly to flee the city—the prophecy was either gibberish or perhaps recommended a defense on the Athenian Acropolis behind wooden walls of old doors, castoff furnishings, and rough logs. But Themistocles persuaded his fellow generals that Delphi’s “wooden wall” could only refer to their own fleet of pine- and fir-planked triremes. Why, after all, would the oracle at Delphi call Athenian-held Salamis “holy,” if she did not mean victory was assured there for the Greeks should they dare fight by sea? Whether Themistocles’ agents had something to do with cooking up the prophecy, or twisting its interpretation, we do not know. But he certainly was not going to let the superstitious or pusillanimous thwart his plans to gamble all at Salamis, a strategy based on a decade of reasoning, not prophetic hocus-pocus.
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The real divide at Salamis arose over the proper way to defend the Athenians from hundreds of thousands of Persians. The enemy infantry and marine forces had not suffered a single defeat in the five months since their arrival in Europe. Two defensive strategies were hotly debated—the first among Athenians themselves, whether to protect the city proper or evacuate the population, and a second between the remaining city-states of the alliance over whether to fight at sea in the Bay of Salamis or to fall back southward even further.

Some of these deliberations were cut short when Xerxes arrived in Attica and quickly stormed Athens. The king’s forces in short order had surrounded the Acropolis, where a diehard Athenian contingent proved that the oracle did not mean their futile barricade was any sort of literal “wooden wall.” No prisoners were taken. Themistocles had previously introduced a decree to evacuate the city (a later version of the original proclamation on stone was first published in 1960) that directed the Athenians to the nearby islands and the northern Argolid. The city-state’s defense was reduced to those who manned about 180 triremes in the Bay of Salamis, along with small contingents of hoplites.

The renegade Spartan ex-king Demaratus, now a Persian court adviser, had urged Xerxes to avoid Salamis. Instead, he argued, the Persians should sail around the Peloponnese to occupy the island of Cythera off Sparta. That way, Demaratus insisted, the Persians could avoid losses, tie down the Spartan army, and raise a revolt of the city-state’s agricultural serfs, the helots—perhaps putting Demaratus himself back in power at Sparta as a puppet satrap king. With Athens in flames and the Greek fleet trapped in the straits of Salamis, however, such wise but cautious advice seemed timid to Xerxes. Instead, once the Greek armada was easily swamped here at Salamis, the Persians could simply land troops wherever they pleased in the Peloponnese. The plan was to pick off the few remaining city-states one by one.
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For their part, other Greek leaders had proposed several complicated alternative strategies before and after the retreat from Thermopylae. Many Athenians, for example, still wished to fight on the Attic plain, not at sea, in some sort of decisive infantry confrontation that might repeat the verdict of Marathon and save their city while restoring the prestige of the hoplite class. But that dream was quickly tabled after the disaster at Thermopylae. The rapidity of the Persian onslaught, the absence of willing allies, and the fact that King Xerxes this time had far more land forces than his father, Darius, had sent ten years earlier, for now all made
another Marathon impossible. Those at Marathon had been outnumbered three to one. But the Persian land forces were at least ten times larger than the Athenian hoplite army. Only a few isolated pockets of Athenians remained holed up in the Attic countryside.
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The second option, of garrisoning the city proper, had already proved suicidal. The few who had remained at Athens to defend the wooden ramparts on the Acropolis were dead.

A third choice was simply for Athenians and the remaining allies to quit and join the Persians. Some Athenians were furious at the Peloponnesian city-states for abandoning them to the Persians without a fight. Many felt their cause was hopeless. Still, most at Salamis stayed firm. As long as the surviving Greek states had nearly four hundred ships, and the soil of the Megarid and the Peloponnese was still Greek, such surrender seemed premature, even if it meant tens of thousands of Athenians camping in the countryside without adequate shelter and food.

Most of the remaining allies, in fact, initially preferred a fourth and more defensible choice: to fight on land behind makeshift ramparts along the six-mile-wide isthmus. That strategy might save what was left of Greece to the south. The ships of Athens that way could retreat southward and engage the enemy somewhere off the coast of the Peloponnese. Who could object to that? The maritime Athenians, after all, earlier had not offered any of their ten thousand hoplites to fight at the shared land defense of Thermopylae. Now, in tit-for-tat fashion, the land powers of the Peloponnese preferred not to risk any of their own ships in the defense of an evacuated Athens.

Still, Themistocles wondered whether the Spartan proposals even served their own best interests. What then would prevent a Persian amphibious landing behind an isthmus wall (of the sort the turncoat Demaratus had in fact advised Xerxes to make)? Would not fighting in more open seas off the Peloponnese only give more advantages to a far larger enemy fleet? Why would the Athenians be willing to sacrifice any hope of recovering their city only to fight on behalf of Peloponnesians who clearly all along cared only for their own defense? More immediately, what would the assembled Greeks do about thousands of hungry refugees on Salamis, whose safety depended on the Greek ships in the harbors of the island? Who could restore morale after four successive withdrawals—from the Vale of Tempe in Thessaly, Thermopylae, Artemisium, and Salamis? An alliance that either loses battles or does not fight them finds it almost impossible to turn on its aggressor and cede no more ground.
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The squabbling Greeks before Salamis heard yet a fifth alternative—a most bizarre threat from Themistocles himself. He warned that the furious and betrayed Athenians would pull up stakes entirely. If the Athenians were to be sacrificed by their Peloponnesian and island allies, and a general retreat ordered to the south, then Themistocles would round up the city’s refugees. He would sail them to distant Sicily and shuttle more than two hundred thousand Athenian residents near their colony at Siris—rebirthing Athenian culture in safety eight hundred miles to the west and ensuring that the Greeks’ largest fleet would not fight for those still free in the Peloponnese.

“If you do not [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 without allies such as ourselves, will have reason to remember my words.”
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The final bad choice from among the far worse alternatives was for the remaining allies to fight a sea battle at Salamis. They would cede no more Greek territory. Instead, the admirals would preserve Greek unity and hope to cripple the Persian fleet—and with it any chance of escape of the massive army of Xerxes. Because there were finite supplies at Salamis, and thousands of refugees to feed, there was no time left for talk. The battle had to be joined almost immediately, even if most of the assembled admirals would have to give in to Themistocles’ threats and override the original wishes of their own political authorities back home to retreat to a Panhellenic defense at the Isthmus.
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