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

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).
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