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

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