Free Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power by Victor Davis Hanson

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