Chapter 2
Introduction
The Battle of Salamis has been labelled with justification as one of the great and decisive battles in the history of Western Civilization. Indeed, according to the military historian Barry Strauss, Salamis, perhaps more than any other battle, saved Western Civilization itself. Marathon might be more famous because of the long-distance race named after it; Thermopylae might inspire more awe because of the noble stand of so few against so many; but for its sheer importance to the outcome of a major war – indeed a true ‘clash of civilizations’ (at least as the Greeks saw it after the war) – Salamis stands apart. It is important in another way too: Salamis was a victory of ships, of oarsmen, the first such victory in Greek history. From the masses of dead washing ashore on the south coast of Attica, and from the wrecked hulls of ships from Greece, Asia Minor, and the Levant, arose a newly radical movement for democracy. The Athenian rowers in the fleet, many of whom were of the lower classes, demanded that their contribution to Greek civilization be rewarded with greater political power. Athens was already a democracy in 480 BCE, but it became a far more representative democracy in the decades to follow. At Salamis the Persians were the vanquished; the Athenian citizen masses were the victors.
Directions to the Site
The battle site can be viewed from both the mainland and the island of Salamis itself. On the mainland, the best position is on the slopes of Mt Egaleo, above the town of Perama, a suburb of Piraeus (about a half-hour drive from Athens). To get to Perama from the centre of Athens, take Leof. Pireos (the main boulevard to Piraeus). Once in Piraeus, continue along Agiou Dionisiou until you see the main port of Piraeus immediately on your left. Turn right onto Etolikou, and after a kilometre turn left onto Chromovitou, which will become Leof. Dimokratias. Dimokratias runs through the centre of Perama. At the very eastern edge of Perama, just as you enter the town along Dimokratias, the Church of Agia Marina sits prominently on the slopes of Egaleo, and can be reached on foot by a staircase. The terraces of this church afford a panoramic view of the island of Salamis and the straits where the battle was fought. The ferry to Salamis can also be caught from Perama (€7 one way for a car with three passengers at the time of writing). The ferry terminal can be found by following Dimokratias to the westernmost section of the Perama harbourfront. Once off the ferry on the island, veer left and follow the signs for the tumulus monument and Kynosoura. At the neck of the Kynosoura peninsula, you will find the modern monument to the Battle of Salamis. By driving further on to the Kynosoura, you will come to a high point from which you can view the straits and the small island of Psytaleia. As an alternate route, you can also take a ferry between Salamis and Piraeus, which will travel through the straits along the battle site itself.
Historical Outline of the Battle
In 480 BCE, Xerxes led against mainland Greece one of the largest military forces ever assembled, a peerless army and navy made up of fighters from the dozens of nations under the power of the Great King of Persia. Xerxes’ larger aim was to add Greece to his empire, but he was especially keen to punish Athens for its role in humiliating his father, Darius, at Marathon ten years earlier. The patriotic Greeks, who had entered into an alliance against the existential threat posed by Persia, had but two places where they could make a credible stand against Xerxes’ hordes: the Vale of Tempe running between the mountains of Ossa and Olympus, forming the gate between Macedonia and the plains of Thessaly; and Thermopylae, a narrow pass along the sea guarding the entrance to Boeotia and southern Greece.
No stand was made at Tempe, since it was discovered that there were alternate ways into Thessaly, leaving the Greeks at risk of being outflanked and surrounded. The Thessalians – as the Macedonians before them – thus submitted to Persia. The stand at Thermopylae has become the stuff of legend, where a small force of Greeks led by 300 elite Spartans under the command of their king, Leonidas, fought and died to a man after killing countless Persians over several bloody days. The action at Thermopylae was fought in conjunction with a naval operation off Cape Artemisium, protruding from the northern tip of the island of Euboea, just opposite Thermopylae (both battles are covered in this book). Once the Spartans and their allies were killed at Thermopylae, the Greek ships abandoned Artemisium and headed south to regroup at the Isthmus of Corinth. Nothing now prevented Xerxes from marching against Athens. The city that had invented democracy less than three decades earlier – and had staunchly defended it at Marathon – was soon to be burned to assuage Xerxes’ wrath.
The Athenians, rather than submitting to Persia – which perhaps was still an option, despite Xerxes’ stated aim of destroying the city – packed up their women, children, livestock and movable property, and transferred everything to the island of Salamis, a part of Attic territory, and to Troizen, a city lying across the Saronic Gulf. The Athenian men – virtually every available one of them – were to serve aboard the 180 Athenian triremes, comprising roughly half of the entire Greek fleet. By abandoning Athens instead of capitulating, John Lazenby argues that the Athenians showed great moral courage. The Athenians recognized that their polis was made up of its people, not houses, temples or fields. Come what may, there would still be Athenians, and they were not about to abandon their carefully considered ideals. A scattered few Athenians, however, had refused to leave the city, relying on a Delphic prophecy that Athens would be saved by its ‘wooden walls’, which these stubborn holdouts interpreted as referring to the wooden palisade on the Acropolis. After putting up some resistance, these few Athenians met their end when the Persians found a way to ascend a particularly steep and therefore undefended part of the Acropolis. Seeing that all was lost, several Athenian defenders hurled themselves from the walls to their death. Xerxes then set the city on fire and razed it to the ground. Even today, column drums from the destroyed Old Temple of Athena Polias, which was replaced in the mid-fifth century BCE by the temples of the Periclean building programme, can be seen built into the north wall of the Acropolis, a permanent reminder to the Athenians of what the Persians had done and what the true cost of their democracy was.
Salamis Map 1. Satellite image courtesy of the USGS.
There was another interpretation of the ‘wooden walls’ prophecy. Themistocles, a shrewd and energetic politician who in 480 BCE was enjoying a period of preeminence in Athens, urged that the prophecy referred cryptically to the Athenians’ ships, which were, after all, made of wood. Athens had its large navy in the first place due to Themistocles’ foresight. In 483, a rich vein of silver had been discovered at Laureion in south-eastern Attica, and Themistocles convinced the Athenians to give the money gained from this windfall to the 100 richest Athenians, which the Athenians did on the promise that these wealthy men would make the best use of the money for the city as a whole. Themistocles and his wealthy collaborators then used the money to construct a fleet of triremes. These triremes were ostensibly for defeating Athens’ rival Aegina, but the sources indicate that Themistocles recognized the looming threat of Persia and conceived of the fleet as the best possible Athenian defence against the Persians.
Salamis itself promised to be the ideal place to make a stand against the Persian fleet. At its north-eastern corner, the island is separated from mainland Attica by a narrow strait that at several points is barely a kilometre wide, while the island itself provided many bays which made ideal bases for the Greek triremes. The Persian fleet, led by crack contingents of Phoenicians – the ancient world’s foremost mariners – was likely 600-700 ships strong, while the Greeks could only muster between 310-370 ships, around half of which were from Athens. Due to the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Persians, coupled with the Phoenicians’ expert skill at manoeuvring their light and fast ships, the outnumbered – and, in the early fifth century, comparatively heavy – Greek ships were in need of a force multiplier. Where the narrow pass of Thermopylae had allowed a small number of hoplites to withstand much greater numbers of Persian troops, Salamis could do the same for the Greek sailors. Xerxes had designed his invasion as a combined operation on land and sea. His massive land army relied on the fleet for supply and support. As such, knocking out the Persian navy by making use of the favourable geography of the Salamis straits would give the Greeks a chance of crippling the Persian invasion, perhaps fatally.
According to Herodotus, though, the naval battle at Salamis almost did not happen. The Peloponnesian Greeks felt that Athens had already been lost, and that the best chance the remaining free Greeks had was to return to the Peloponnese to seek shelter among their own people. They also planned to make a stand at the Isthmus of Corinth, and had been feverishly constructing a wall across the entire 6km of the isthmus’ narrowest point. By the time of the sack of Athens, the wall was nearing completion. Why fight at Salamis for Athens, a country that had already fallen? Among the Persians (though of course Herodotus’ account of Persian motivations and plans must be received cautiously), most of Xerxes’ commanders apparently argued in favour of a naval engagement at Salamis. The only holdout was Artemisia, the bold and controversial queen of Halicarnassus, Herodotus’ hometown. Artemisia is one of the most colourful characters to emerge from the pages of the Greek historians, and Salamis was her finest hour. She urged Xerxes simply to bypass the Greek fleet at Salamis, rather than risk an engagement in narrow waters. Instead, the Persians were sure to find success if they simply waited the Greeks out and allowed the Greeks’ natural quarrelsomeness and self-interest to break apart their coalition. With his massive land army, supported by his fleet, Xerxes would have his pick of places to land in the Peloponnese and attack the Greek holdouts at his leisure. Artemisia’s advice was good, but, as so often in Herodotus, it went unheeded. Xerxes resolved to fight it out at sea.
Clearly, especially in retrospect, this was a bad move on Xerxes’ part. The narrow ground at Thermopylae had taught the Persians what small numbers of Greeks could do in favourable terrain, and at the naval battles at Artemisium, fought in conjunction with the action at Thermopylae, the Persians had achieved a stalemate at best against outnumbered Greek ships. Herodotus explains Xerxes’ decision primarily by one fact: Xerxes had not been present personally at Artemisium, whereas at Salamis he had made arrangements to watch the battle. His presence, or so Xerxes reasoned, would ensure that his navy fought its best under the watchful eye of the Great King.
The Greeks gathered in their ships at Salamis held a conference to decide what to do. Although the Athenians had by far the largest contingent of ships, the leaders of the Greek coalition were the Spartans, and it was the Spartan commander, Eurybiades, that the various Greek speakers tried to convince. The Corinthians led the appeal for retiring behind the isthmus, arguing that should the Greek fleet lose at Salamis, they would be trapped on the island. Besides, Athens had already fallen. It fell to Themistocles, the wily Athenian, to argue in favour of a naval battle. Themistocles delivered a three-pronged statement. First, the isthmus fortifications would not long stand against the combined weight of Xerxes’ army and navy. Second, at Salamis the Greeks would fight as one nation, whereas should they retire to their own homes, they would be divided and easy pickings for the Persians. And finally, if the other Greeks did not stand against the Persians at Salamis, and allowed Athens to remain a smoldering ruin, the Athenians would pack up their ships and head west to a new colony. The rest of the Greeks would not be able to withstand the Persians for long without Athens’ many ships. Themistocles’ arguments prevailed, and Eurybiades decided to fight at Salamis.
Athens’ Greek rivals, however, did not accept defeat so easily. They held another meeting at which the consensus was to flee to the Peloponnese. Desperate, Themistocles is said to have sent a trusted slave to deliver a secret message to Xerxes to the effect that the Greeks were scared and broken, and planned to make a break for it. Though perhaps difficult to believe, the secret messenger is attested by both Herodotus and Aeschylus, so there is no reason to discount the story. Upon hearing the message, Xerxes ordered his fleet to block the channels from Salamis, probably the narrows on either side of the islet of Psytaleia at the north-eastern side of Salamis, towards the Piraeus, instead of the far western channel of the island, as some scholars have argued. He also stationed many soldiers on Psytaleia itself, to kill those Greeks and assist those Persians who washed ashore in the coming battle. Taking his cue from Themistocles, Xerxes reckoned that he had the Greeks right where he wanted them, and in one devastating blow would bring the entire war to an end. For Themistocles, the benefits were twofold: he had ensured that a naval battle would take place, whether the Greeks liked it or not, and to boot he had ingratiated himself with the Persian king should the battle go in the Persians’ favour.
As they were preparing to leave with their ships, the Peloponnesian Greeks got word of the Persian blockade. Two Greek ships managed to cross the Persian lines: one commanded by the Athenian Aristides, dubbed ‘the just’ by his countrymen and newly returned from exile, and another carrying the images of the sons of the hero Aeacus from the island of Aegina. Though Aristides and Themistocles were bitter rivals, Themistocles urged Aristides to tell the Greeks about the impossibility of escape. Resolved to their changed circumstances, the Greeks determined to fight the Persian fleet in the morning. Relatively safe in their bases on Salamis, the Greeks rested for the night. The Persians, on the other hand, were kept all night at their oars to prevent the Greeks from escaping. Keeping a fleet of triremes in formation at sea is no easy task, and the night would have left the Persian crews exhausted. At least the Persians could expect to face a demoralized Greek force, seeking to run away – or so the Persians thought.
Salamis Map 2: Persian position blocking the channel. Satellite image courtesy of the USGS.
When morning came, the Persians seem to have entered the straits proper. Since the Persians held the shore on the mainland beneath Mount Aigaleos, where Xerxes sat to watch the battle, the Persian ships probably stretched in a line east-to-west, with the mainland at their backs. The Greeks would have emerged from the various coves along the Salamis coast, likely in a double-line due to the confined space, and were led by their right wing as they stretched along Salamis from the islet of Ag. Giorgios to Psytaleia, with their own friendly shore of Salamis behind them. Herodotus says that on the Persian right were the Phoenicians, the best contingent in the Persian navy, facing the Greek left, where the Athenians and Aeginetans were arrayed. The Persian left wing in the straits, on the end of the line towards the Piraeus, consisted of the Ionian Greeks, marshalled opposite Eurybiades and the Spartans on the Greek right. The rest of the massive Persian fleet waited outside of the straits, behind Psytaleia.
Our two main sources for the battle, Herodotus and Aeschylus, disagree on what happened next. Herodotus says that the Greek ships, once lined up against their foe, began to back water until they almost ran their sterns aground. Perhaps this was a way to lure the Persian fleet even further into the straits, or perhaps the Greeks were simply nervous to begin the battle. Only a mysterious divine voice rallied the Greeks and checked their backward movement. On the other hand, Aeschylus, who was most likely present at the battle itself, says that the tired Persians were shocked and dismayed by the Greek force rushing out against them, singing the Paean, the war-song, and sounding the trumpets of battle. Here were not men afraid and seeking to escape to the Peloponnese, but a well-rested and determined coalition, eager to fight on behalf of their homes, shrines and way of life. If the Greeks really did advance so determinedly, the Persians’ morale must have been shattered.
Herodotus and Aeschylus do agree that one Greek ship began the engagement by rushing out and ramming a Phoenician trireme. Herodotus tells two versions of the story. Either an Athenian ship led the charge, or an Aeginetan deserves the credit. Both Athens and Aegina continued to quarrel for the next several decades over which state should be honoured as striking the first blow at Salamis. As so often happened in trireme warfare, the Greek ship got its ram stuck in the hull of its enemy and was unable to break away from the kill. Other Greek ships rushed to the help of their countrymen. The fight then became general all across the Greek and Persian lines, with the Greeks having the best of it. In the narrow waters between Salamis and the mainland, the Phoenicians’ expertise and their ships’ greater manoeuvrability did not avail them. As Phoenician and Ionian wrecks multiplied in the face of a concerted Greek attack, and as the sailors of the Persian fleet were killed in great numbers and covered the waters and the shores with corpses, the Persian ships ran afoul of one another in the narrow space.
Salamis Map 3: The battle in the straits. Satellite image courtesy of the USGS.
Xerxes’ presence above the battle, far from helping his cause, served to make things much worse for the Persians. In their eagerness to do something noteworthy in front of their king, the Persian ships outside of the straits rushed to join the battle, thereby crashing right into the beleaguered Phoenicians and Ionians who were themselves trying to get out of the straits alive. In this hideous bottleneck, more and more Persian ships and sailors met a grim end. Just as Themistocles had predicted, the narrow waters turned Persia’s numerical superiority into a great disadvantage. Never had so many men died in a single day, according to the Persian messenger in Aeschylus’ lines about the battle. Compounding their losses, most of the Persian sailors could not swim, so they had no chance once their ships went down. One ship, however, did distinguish itself in front of Xerxes: that commanded by Artemisia. The Greeks desperately wanted to take Artemisia alive, since the idea of a woman waging war against them was abhorrent. As one Greek ship approached Artemisia, she did the unthinkable, ramming and sinking one of the ships in her own squadron so as to appear to be fighting on the Greek side. The Greek ship duly broke off its pursuit, thinking that Artemisia was an ally, and a capable one at that. Seeing this display of brilliant treachery, Xerxes remarked that his women had become men and his men women.
The final blow to the Persians came when Aristides led a group of hoplites to the islet of Psytaleia, where they proceeded to slaughter all of the Persian infantry that had been stationed there. Staying true to the typical Greek prejudice in favour of hoplite troops and against lower-born sailors, Aeschylus treats this as a disaster equal to the loss of the countless men aboard the Persian ships. While perhaps not as pivotal to the battle as the naval action, this small amphibious operation drove home the extent of the Persian defeat. There was nothing the Persian ships could do to help their men on Psytaleia.
After the battle, despite their great losses, the Persians still had plenty of ships, and the Greeks fully expected to have to fight again. Xerxes, however, in fear for his own safety, and worried that the Greeks might destroy his bridges across the Hellespont, decided to leave Greece. Still covering all of his bases, Themistocles sent another secret message to Xerxes, claiming that he had convinced the Greeks not to destroy the bridges, thus allowing Xerxes safe passage back to Asia. Indeed, in the years to come, once Themistocles fell out of favour at Athens, he called in his favour to Xerxes and lived for a time as a Persian grandee, one of the great ironies of ancient history. Xerxes thus left Greece with a majority of his army and his remaining navy. He did, though, leave a portion of his army behind with the general Mardonius, the original architect of the invasion who surely feared for his own safety should he fail to secure Greece for his master. It was the force that the Greeks would face the following year at Plataea. The victory at Salamis, however, has usually been seen as the truly decisive clash. It is difficult to imagine that Mardonius would have been able to conquer the Peloponnese without naval support, even if he had won at Plataea. In all likelihood, Salamis ended the Persian plan to conquer the whole of Greece.
So why did the Greeks win? It is difficult to beat Barry Strauss’ straightforward explanation: a combination of shock, command and geography. In battle, one should never underestimate the importance of surprise, and there is every reason to believe that the Persians were utterly shocked by the Greeks’ eagerness to fight on the morning of the battle. Tired from a night at the oars, the Persians’ dismay in the face of their fresh and determined foe must have been palpable. As for command, the Greeks could not have asked for a better leader than Themistocles, who was smart enough to see the importance of fighting the Persians at Salamis, and shrewd enough to make it happen – all while playing both sides and making himself appear loyal to both the Greeks and the Persian king. And as the narrow ground of Thermopylae was a force multiplier for the small number of Greeks facing the numberless Persians, so too were the narrow waters between Salamis and the Attic mainland a decisive factor in favour of the fewer and heavier Greek ships against the many light ships in the Persian fleet. Expert naval manoeuvres are only as good as space allows, which the skilled Phoenicians leading Xerxes’ force learned most bitterly. And finally, as we are told by the stirring lines of Aeschylus’ play The Persians, sheer guts and resolution played a part too: ‘Onward, sons of the Greeks! Set free your fatherland, your children, wives, ancestral shrines, and the tombs of your fathers. The struggle now is for all of these!’
The Battle Site Today
A good place to start a tour of this battlefield is from the terraces of the Agia Marina church (N37° 57.843"; E023° 36.016"), rising above Perama on the slopes of Mt Egaleo (ancient Aigaleos). Somewhere on these slopes, Xerxes, the Great King of Persia himself, sat along with his entire retinue in order to watch the battle in person and spur on valiant deeds from his fleet. From this vantage point, you can look past the industrial sprawl of the modern Athenian ports to the straits between the mainland and Salamis where the battle was fought. Looking due south, the Kynosoura peninsula is visible extending from the island of Salamis. The Greek right, where the Spartans were in nominal command of the fleet, was probably anchored on the eastern tip of the peninsula. The fleet itself extended along the northern edge of Kynosoura and stretched all the way to the islet of Ag. Giorgios (St George in English). Ag. Giorgios, some 3km to the west and home to a modern military base, likely protected the left flank of the Greek fleet, where the Athenians and Aeginetans were stationed. On the morning of the battle, the Phoenician and Ionian contingents in the Persian fleet were arrayed along the Attic coast, just below Perama where today shipping containers line the shore. The Phoencians were on the Persian right, across from the Athenians and Aeginetans, while the Ionians faced the Spartans and other Greeks. Perched above Perama, Xerxes would have been alarmingly close to his ships, close enough for those aboard to fear for their lives lest they fail to perform creditably. The majority of Persian land troops were stationed below Xerxes, along the Attic shore, to help their own sailors, and to kill those Greeks who came ashore as their ships were sunk or disabled during the battle.
Just to the east of Kynosoura is the small island of Psytaleia, still windswept and barren, where Xerxes had placed his infantry in order to dispatch any Greeks who happened to wash ashore. Of course, in the event, it was the Greeks, under Aristides, who ended up slaughtering these marooned Persians. During the battle, Psytaleia served to choke up access to the straits. East of the island, the mass of the rest of the Persian fleet waited to enter the fray. Once Persian reinforcements started to pour in around Psytaleia, a bottleneck formed between those eager to demonstrate their bravery in front of the king, and those routed Phoenicians and Ionians who were trying to flee from the victorious Greeks. It was here that Persian ships ran afoul of one another, causing great mayhem, destruction and loss of life.
The Agia Marina church also offers a view of the Piraeus, the famous ancient and modern port of Athens to the south-east, just beyond the prominent red-and-white striped smokestacks, where large cruise ships and ferries are usually present. In 480, the Piraeus was not yet the main port of Athens. Instead, the Athenians, and the Persians, made use of the beaches lining Phaleron Bay, further to the east and beyond the prominent hill of Mounichia. Surprisingly, the Acropolis, some 11km away, is also visible from the Agia Maria church on clear days. In 480, there would have been no air pollution to obstruct Xerxes’ view of the Acropolis and city of Athens, which he had gleefully burned in revenge for the outrage of Marathon. From the slopes of Aigaleos, Xerxes could truly survey what he considered to be his domain. All that remained was for his fleet to crush the Greeks before his eyes. In the event, things turned out differently than he expected.
Fig. 2.1: The Salamis straits, looking from the island towards the mainland and Mt. Egaleo. Authors’ photo.
Crossing over to the island via ferry is worthwhile for two reasons. First, the ferry travels right through the straits in which the battle was fought. The Perama-Salamis ferry crosses the waters where the Phoenicians on the Persian right were stationed, and skirts the islet of Ag. Giorgios, against which the Athenians and Aeginetans on the Greek left were anchored. There is also a ferry running between Salamis and Piraeus that travels through the entire battle area, running along the Kynosoura peninsula and past the northern edge of Psytaleia before entering the large commercial port of the Piraeus. Secondly, the Kynosoura peninsula itself (N37° 56.688"; E023° 33.911") offers good views of the straits and especially the island of Psytaleia. Near the neck of the peninsula, it is worth stopping at the modern monument to the Battle of Salamis (N37° 56.817"; E023° 33%.073"), which depicts two marines, an archer and a hoplite, at the bow of a trireme. This monument was built in 2006 on the site of an ancient burial mound that might have included the dead from the battle, though this is by no means certain since the mound has never been systematically excavated. There was an ancient trophy from the battle too, which might have been identified by a stone and cutting found at the tip of the Kynosoura peninsula.
Fig. 2.2: The modern monument to Salamis. Authors’ photo.
Further Reading
Ancient Sources
–Herodotus 8.40-125
The necessary starting point for any study of the Battle of Salamis. Herodotus, writing a generation and a half after Salamis, gives a plausible if too brief account of the battle that is embellished by lively anecdotes about Themistocles, Xerxes and Artemisia.
–Aeschylus, The Persians
Produced less than a decade after the battle, and written by a participant in the battle itself, this play offers a riveting, dramatized picture of the naval clash. The Persians gives several important details to supplement Herodotus’ account.
–Diodorus 11.18-19
A first-century BCE source who draws upon the lost fourth-century account of Ephorus. While providing a fuller tactical account of the Battle of Salamis than the earlier sources, Diodorus’ reconstruction suffers from several problems, and in general should not be preferred to the accounts of Herodotus and Aeschylus.
–The ‘Themistocles Decree’ (ML 23)
Found at Troizen, just across the Saronic Gulf from Athens, this inscription claims to record a decree of the Athenian assembly outlining a carefully considered strategy of luring the Persians into the straits at Salamis. Most scholars do not consider this a genuine decree, not least because it contradicts Herodotus’ account in which the Athenians abandoned their homeland as an emergency measure, not because of a settled plan.
Modern Sources
Books
–Green, Peter, The Greco-Persian Wars (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1996).
An entertaining account of the Persian Wars and the Battle of Salamis that relies more than most other modern works on the late evidence from Diodorus.
–Hale, John R., Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy (New York: Penguin, 2009).
An entertaining and readable account of the role of the navy in Athenian history.
–Lazenby, J.F., The Defence of Greece, 490-479 BC (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1993).
Quite possibly the best single-volume treatment of the military history of the Persian Wars, with a convincing and readable reconstruction of the Battle of Salamis.
–Morrison, J.S., Coates, J.F., and Rankov, N.B., The Athenian Trireme: The History and Reconstruction of an Ancient Greek Warship, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
An essential book for anyone wanting to understand Greek naval warfare, this volume details the construction of the Olympias trireme in the 1980s, in addition to offering a study of trireme battles and tactics.
–Strauss, Barry, The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter that Saved Greece – and Western Civilization (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
A lively and popular account of the battle and its historical context, along with very useful notes and a bibliographic essay. This is the best modern book on Salamis.
Articles
–Holladay, A.J., ‘Further Thoughts on Trireme Tactics’, Greece & Rome 35 (1988), pp.149-51.
A brief and informative article offering some clarification on the arguments of Lazenby and Whitehead (whose work is included below) on trireme tactics.
–Lazenby, J.F., ‘The Diekplous’, Greece & Rome 34 (1987), pp.169-77.
A discussion about one of the standard tactics ascribed to ancient triremes, arguing that the manoeuvre was undertaken by single ships, rather than entire formations as some scholars have suggested.
–Whitehead, Ian, ‘The Periplous’, Greece & Rome 34 (1987), pp.178-85.
A discussion of another standard tactic of Greek triremes, likening this manoeuvre to a ‘dog-fight’.