CHAPTER FOUR
He is dressed in a long, coarse, woolen garment wrapped tightly around his body. Draped over his shoulders, the crimson-colored cloak extends to his ankles. Carefully braided strands of his long hair run down both his chest and back. His bronze helmet is crowned with a transverse crest as a mark of his high rank. He carries a wooden staff as a sign of office. He is barefoot.
His face, or what is visible of it under the helmet, has the lean look of a lifetime of rugged training. If his eyes betray any expression, it is probably the dispassion that the Spartans considered to be almost always appropriate, except when they were mourning the death of a family member in battle, in which case they were supposed to smile from pride. The Spartans were a paradoxical people, and in Eurybiades son of Eurycleides, their ironies reached a peak. This description of him is an educated guess, but the burdens that he bore were all real.
He was the commander in chief of the Greek navy, and on Salamis on September 23, it was his job to hammer out a common strategy among his squabbling allies. In Salamis the goats were grazing and the Greeks were butting heads. The role of conciliator did not come easily to a Spartan, but neither did the role of admiral. The Spartans were a nation of infantrymen. Sparta’s navy was small and unimportant, a mere concession to the geographical accident that Spartan territory extended to the sea. Yet asnavarch,“admiral,” Eurybiades exercised power that would have been denied to him on land. Only a king could command a Spartan army on land, and Eurybiades was a commoner.
Eurybiades was an ambitious man but a feeble manager. As far as we can tell, he had neither strong opinions nor deep insight. He was not about to whip the bickering Greeks on Salamis into shape. But he was a patriot and had the one touch of greatness of knowing when to yield to a better man.
The war had swollen the size of Salamis’s population. In peacetime there were perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 inhabitants on the island; suddenly, another 100,000 to 150,000 people had arrived. That included the personnel of more than three hundred triremes of the Greek fleet as well as a large portion of Athens’s civilian refugees. And at times it might have seemed as if every last Greek on Salamis was at odds with all the others. The locals were no doubt tired of the newcomers even as the less scrupulous tried to squeeze a few extra coins out of them. The rowers complained about their captains. The captains complained about their commanders. The commanders of each city-state’s contingent complained about the other city-states’ contingents. Everyone appeared to have his own strategy and was ready to defend it to the death. Meanwhile, the Greeks looked across the straits at the empty countryside of Attica and waited for the barbarians. For two weeks Persia’s forces had been lumbering in, from the first fast horsemen to the last camp followers.
“Pounded by the sea,” as Sophocles calls Salamis, and short on arable land, the ancient island, like its modern counterpart, is likely to have housed fishermen in nearly every cove. Each morning in the predawn hours when the water was at its calmest, and so least likely to disturb their nets, they headed out to sea. But even if every fisherman on Salamis had doubled his catch, the islanders still could not have fed all the immigrants. The Athenians no doubt ferried over grain and other supplies to the island, but there was a limit to the amount they could have provided. Nor was it practical for them to carry over freshwater, which is usually at a premium in Greece.
The refugees had reason to be frightened, the sailors had reason to be vigilant, and everyone had a right to be tired. The civilians had been uprooted; the naval personnel had been rowing and fighting for more than three weeks. During that time the seamen had also had to repair ships, cremate the dead, practice maneuvers, and mount a major evacuation. And, with all the to-ing and fro-ing, most of them had traveled five hundred miles and more. Yet the biggest battle still lay before them.
This was Salamis at the beginning of the fourth week of September of 480 B.C., a harbor turned into a safe haven and a backwater turned into a naval base. That the Greek fleet was at Salamis at all was itself the result of a Themistoclean ruse. After Artemisium, when the Athenians learned that there would be no infantry stand in Boeotia, they asked their allies to stop at Salamis on their way back home to Aegina, the Peloponnese, or the island of Ceos. The Athenians needed to evacuate their people from Attica. Afterward it would be convenient for them to meet the allies at Salamis to plot the fleet’s next move. The allies agreed. Meanwhile, reinforcement ships, which had not been at Artemisium, had gathered at Pogon, near Troezen, on the western side of the Saronic Gulf. They made for Salamis as well.
Salamis was simply a meeting point. No ally had agreed to fight a battle there. On the contrary, the obvious move might have seemed to move the fleet to a harbor at the Isthmus of Corinth. The Greek alliance’s army was making its stand there, and surely it made sense to have the navy nearby.
At the very end of August the Spartans received news of the disaster at Thermopylae. The full moon of August 19 had marked the end of the Olympic Games as well as of the Carnea, a Spartan festival. During the festival religious scruples added to the arguments of Spartan doves against mobilizing in any large number. Now that they had satisfied the gods and Thermopylae had fallen, the Spartans immediately called their army out in fall force and marched to the Isthmus. Here, joined by troops from Corinth and from a dozen or so other Peloponnesian city-states, they blocked the main road and began building a wall across the narrow Isthmus, at its narrowest less than five miles wide. They worked night and day on the project, using stone, bricks, timbers, and sand baskets.
Corinth had an excellent harbor on the Saronic Gulf not far from the wall, at a place called Cenchreae. It is understandable if Corinthians and other Peloponnesians preferred to fight there rather than at Salamis.
Yet the fleet was at Salamis and any movement would have seemed like a retreat. Themistocles, who wanted to fight at Salamis, knew that, just as he knew that Athens’s approximately two hundred triremes made up more than half of the Greek navy. Athens had a great deal of clout.
Salamis is an island of modest dimensions. It is about thirty six square miles in area, making it about twenty-five times smaller than Attica. It is an island of low hills, whose highest point is a mountain in the south rising 1,325 feet.
Salamis is a horseshoe-shaped island, containing about sixty-four miles of coastline, with its hollow side facing west. Nestled along the western coast of Attica, Salamis stretches as far west as Megara, the city-state whose territory lay between Athens and Corinth. On the coast opposite Salamis to the north, between Megara and the city of Athens, lies the Athenian town of Eleusis. The sea widens into a gulf here. Eleusis was sacred to Demeter, goddess of agriculture, and home of the Eleusinian Mysteries, an annual ritual offering hope of life after death.
In the northeast corner of Salamis is the long and narrow Cynosura peninsula. In Greek, Cynosura means “dog’s tail.” Cynosura juts into the sea, pointing like a dagger northeastward toward Piraeus and the city of Athens beyond. Just northeast of Cynosura lies the islet of Psyttaleia; together the islet and the peninsula all but block off the eastern end of the Salamis straits from the Saronic Gulf. Traveling westward in the straits, about three miles to the west of Psyttaleia one reaches another islet, known today as St. George. Between the two islets, on the northeast side of Salamis and opposite the Athenian mainland, lies the harbor of the ancient city of Salamis.
This harbor, today known as Ambelaki Bay, is an excellent natural anchorage. About one-quarter mile wide at its mouth, it is always calm. The Kamateró peninsula rises to the north, protecting the harbor from the north wind, while south of the harbor the Cynosura peninsula offers shelter from both the south wind and the waves of the Saronic Gulf.
We may imagine that in 480 B.C. part of the Greek fleet was based in Ambelaki Bay. As the site of the classical city, Ambelaki Bay would have been outfitted with a quay for docking ships. But the fleet was large enough that its ships would have spilled over to the next bay northward, Paloukia Bay. Sheltered from the winds by the Kamateró peninsula and by St. George, Paloukia Bay is lined with sandy beaches, ideal for mooring triremes.
Mythology made Salamis home to King Ajax, son of Telamon, a stalwart of the Greek army at Troy. A huge man, Ajax was known as the “bulwark.” As a hero, Ajax represented the triumph of brawn over brains, that is, the opposite of his archenemy, the wily Odysseus. Though based on Ajax’s island, the Greeks would have to emulate Odysseus if they were to defeat Persia. And they would have to match their words with deeds.
Some of the evacuees were no doubt billeted in Salamis’s homes and public buildings, but there could hardly have been room for very many. The captains might have stayed aboard their ships, perhaps in makeshift cabins, but a trireme was too cramped to sleep more than about half of its crew. Many if not most of the newcomers to Salamis would have camped out.
Conditions could hardly have been luxurious. In normal times, it was considered scandalous for a captain to give his oarsmen time off to get washed in the public baths, just the sort of thing to make them too soft for battle. In the emergency of 480 B.C., there was no time for such extravagance, and if there was a bathhouse in Salamis, it could not have fit even a fraction of the men crowded onto the island.
The rowers would have to bathe in the sea or go dirty. But if the Athenians had planned ahead properly, they were probably not hungry. Since Athens’s leaders had expected to use Salamis as a base, they are likely to have stored big supplies of food there for the Greek fleet.
Twenty-two Greek cities were represented at Salamis, for a total of more than three hundred ships. Six states from the Peloponnese provided vessels: Sparta, Corinth, Sicyon, Epidaurus, Troezen, and Hermione. In central Greece, Athens and Megara contributed ships, while Ambracia and Leucas represented northwestern Greece. From the islands there were ships from the city-states of Chalcis, Eretria, and Styra in Euboea, Aegina in the Saronic Gulf, and from the Cyclades, Ceos, Naxos, Cythnos, Seriphos, Siphnos, and Melos. Croton in Italy was the only western Greek city to take part. It sent one trireme, but its crew may all have resided in Greece: political refugees, they were eager to find a patron to help them return home and overthrow their enemies.
Most of these states provided only a tiny number of ships. Leucas, for instance, sent only three triremes; Cythnos sent only a trireme and a penteconter; while Melos, Siphnos and Seriphos sent only penteconters—two from Melos, one each from Siphnos and Seriphos. With its defection at Artemisium, Lemnos provided one trireme. These numbers speak eloquently of financial and demographic poverty and of loyalty to the Greek cause. Plataea, which had sent men to Artemisium to help fill the rowers’ benches of Athens’s triremes, was not represented at Salamis. After Artemisium, the Plataeans had hurried home to convey their families and property to safety.
Several of these states were in the process of being swamped by the Persian tide. Plataea, Chalcis, Eretria, and Styra had fallen. Athens was in the process of evacuation, and once the Persians reached Athens, nothing stopped them from overrunning Megara, the next city-state to the west. Troezen was crowded with Athenian refugees. Except for Seriphos, Siphnos, and Melos, the other Cycladic ships came from states that had submitted to Persia. The commanders disobeyed orders and joined the Greeks.
Still, the allies might have been disappointed at their inability to attract more ships to Salamis. There was one prominent no-show. The Corcyreans had promised ambassadors of the Hellenic League to fight for Greece and against slavery. The western Greek island of Corcyra (modern Corfu) had even launched sixty triremes, a fleet second only to Athens’s in size. But the Corcyreans sent the ships only as far as Cape Taenarum in the southern Peloponnese in order not to anger Xerxes—the eventual winner of the war, they were sure. To the Greeks they pleaded the excuse of the Etesian winds, the powerful nor’easter that sometimes blows in the fall and stops navigation cold.
Then there was Sicily. Its leading Greek city-state was Syracuse, ruled in 480 B.C. by a tyrant named Gelon. The Hellenic League had asked Gelon for help against Persia. He promised a huge number of ships and men but named too high a price: supreme command. Both the Spartan and Athenian ambassadors who went to see him refused. Besides, Gelon had a war with Carthage on his hands. In the end, Gelon sent only a representative to Delphi, carrying a treasure to give as a gift to Xerxes, should the Great King prevail.
The three biggest contingents at Salamis were from Aegina, with 30 ships, Corinth, with 50 ships, and Athens, with 180 ships, about half of the triremes in the Greek fleet; Sparta contributed only 16 ships.
The Greeks had 368 ships at Salamis, as a reasonable reading of the tricky evidence concludes. To take only fifth century B.C. sources: the playwright Aeschylus says that the Greek numbers at Salamis “amounted to thirty tens of ships, and another ten elite ships”; the historian Thucydides reports a claim that the Greeks had 400 ships of which two-thirds (i.e., 267) were Athenian. Aeschylus’s figures are imprecise and poetic; Thucydides’ are imprecise and attributed to a bragging speaker fifty years after the battle. Herodotus’s numbers are better, if problematic.
Herodotus says that the Greeks had 378 ships, of which 180 were Athenian. He also adds that two ships defected to the Greeks from the Persians, bringing the number of ships to an even 380. Unfortunately, when Herodotus cites the ship numbers city-state by city-state, the figures add up to only 366 ships. Herodotus also specifies that the Greek fleet at Salamis was larger than the Greek fleet at Artemisium, which eventually numbered 333 ships. Assuming that Herodotus’s city-by-city figures are more accurate than his total, it would seem that the Greeks had 368 ships (366 plus the two defectors) on the day of the battle of Salamis.
Sparta had been made commander of the allied fleet, probably at the meeting at Corinth in the autumn of 481 B.C. when the Hellenic League had been formed. The natural commander of the fleet would have been an Athenian, presumably Themistocles, but the other Greeks resented Athens’s new naval power and feared Athenian muscle flexing. They insisted on a Spartan commander or they would dissolve the fleet. The Athenians yielded, and the Spartan government named Eurybiades.
Two city-states probably led the charge against the appointment of an Athenian as commander: Aegina and Corinth. Aegina is an island in the Saronic Gulf, south of Salamis, about thirty-three square miles in size. Located about seventeen miles from Athens, Aegina and its conical mountain (about 1,750 feet high) are clearly visible from the Acropolis. Like many neighbors in ancient Greece, Athens and Aegina were longtime rivals. In later years, Pericles expressed Athens’s habitual contempt for its neighbor by describing Aegina as “the eyesore of Piraeus,” referring to Athens’s main port after 479 B.C. Eyesores, of course, need to be rubbed out, and under Pericles, Athens smashed Aegina’s power once and for all. In 480, however, the rivalry was still burning.
Though small, Aegina before the days of Themistocles was a greater naval power than Athens. The Aeginetans were a maritime people who took the turtle as the symbol on their coins. For two decades before 480 B.C, Aegina and Athens waged a very violent war. In 490, on the eve of the Persian landing at Marathon, only Spartan intervention prevented Aegina from joining in the attack on Athens. The two states laid down their differences in 481 at the conference establishing the Hellenic League; no doubt Athens’s sprint ahead in the arms race, by deciding in 483 to build a two-hundred-ship navy, encouraged Aegina to think peace.
Corinth smarted from less nasty wounds. Traditional rivals, Athens and Corinth had avoided all-out war. But Themistocles hardly endeared Athens to Corinth when he arbitrated a dispute between Corinth and Corcyra in the latter’s favor. Corcyra was a naval power and a former colony of Corinth that had little love for its mother city. Looking even farther westward, Themistocles also strengthened Athens’s connections with the Greek city-states in Italy and Sicily.
None of this Athenian interest in the west could have pleased Corinth, which had long had maritime connections there. By modern roads Corinth and Athens are fifty-five miles apart. Ancient Corinth was a wealthy city, grown rich on the oil of the olive trees that grew well in its fertile soil, on maritime trade, and on prostitution. Long the home of a tyranny that was famous for its vices, Corinth in 480 B.C. was now an oligarchy that preferred to sell vice to others. Corinthians were jealous and suspicious of an Athens that had once been a backwater but that had outstripped Corinth first as a trading center and now, recently, as a naval power.
The Corinthian admiral in 480 B.C. was Adimantus son of Ocytus. Corinth was an ally of Sparta, but Corinth loved its luxuries, and Adimantus was no doubt better dressed than Eurybiades. For that matter, he was probably better dressed than Themistocles. Unlike Athenians, Corinth’s oligarchs had no need to look like men of the people. We may imagine Adimantus in an elegant cloak of woven linen, cream-colored with a dark purple edging. His bronze breastplate no doubt featured incised musculature. His helmet, also bronze and made out of a single sheet of metal, was surely of the Corinthian style: close-fitting and custom-made, with a nosepiece and eyeholes. The helmet’s lower edge might have been decorated with a delicate, incised, spiral border. The helmet would give in to a blow without cracking, while padding underneath cushioned the impact. Adimantus may have worn a roll of cloth under his greaves to avoid chafing. His shield may have been emblazoned with an image of Pegasus, the winged horse that was a symbol of Corinth.
Between the return of their fleet from Artemisium and the arrival of the Persians, the Athenians had only five or six days to complete their evacuation. We do not know if the allied ships at Salamis helped the Athenians evacuate Athens or if they stood and waited. No doubt a steady stream of eleventh-hour transfers of people, property, and supplies across the narrow channel from Attica to Salamis was still flowing when the first hoofbeats of the enemy horses were heard. At any rate, even before the enemy had appeared, Eurybiades called the generals of the allied states to a council of war at Salamis. The date was about September 23.
A navy whose main admirals cordially hated each other. A naval commander in chief who came from a country famous for its inattention to ships. A naval base teeming with refugees whom it could not feed for long. A set of allies who were itching to leave the war zone. It was of this unpromising material that the Greeks had to forge a strategy for victory.
Since there were twenty separate commanders at Salamis, they needed a sizable space for their deliberation. Presumably, they met either in a public building or in a large private house. Every Greek city had its agora, the open space in the center of town that combined marketplace and political forum. The agora was usually bordered on one or more sides by a stoa, or covered portico, offering shelter from sun, wind, and rain.
We might imagine the generals at Salamis meeting in a covered portico of the agora, perhaps within sight of the statue there of the great Athenian statesman Solon, shown in the act of addressing the people, with his arm modestly tucked inside his cloak. Perhaps they even met in the Temple of Ajax, a shrine to the great hero.
It is an open question whether the Greeks would have made good use of leisure time for discussion had it been available. The Greeks were so famous for talk and argument that some doubted their capacity for action. Cyrus the Great of Persia, for example, had once dismissed the Spartan army by saying that Greeks were men who set aside a place in the center of town where they could swear oaths and cheat each other, referring to the agora.
The Greeks in council at Salamis would have the chance to prove Cyrus wrong, but they would have to move quickly. However long it took the full Persian force to get from Thermopylae to Athens, once they arrived, they seemed to fly.
Eurybiades opened the meeting by asking for recommendations for strategy. Which of the lands that they controlled should be the base for future naval operations against the enemy? He explicitly excluded Attica, since the Greeks were not defending it. So bald a statement of the facts might have stung Themistocles. True, Eurybiades did not exclude Salamis as a base, but he did not favor it, either.
A variety of opinions was heard, but the most common theme was that the fleet should move westward to the Isthmus of Corinth. Perhaps Themistocles argued that Salamis was no farther from the Isthmus, about twenty-five miles, than Artemisium had been from Thermopylae, a distance of forty miles. And all things considered, the Greeks had done very well at Artemisium. If Themistocles spoke in this vein, he might have been shocked at the response.
Herodotus reports the majority viewpoint among the speakers at the council, and apparently the Peloponnesians predominated among those who spoke. They made it clear that their concern was less the suitability of Salamis as a base for victory than as a getaway point after defeat. If the Greek fleet was beaten at the Isthmus, the Peloponnesian sailors had only to get ashore and they could walk home, if need be. If the Greek fleet was beaten at Salamis, however, the survivors would be blockaded on an island.
In short, the Peloponnesian admirals were defeatists. Their gloom could have only deepened when an Athenian messenger interrupted the council with the news that the Persians were in Attica and had set everything on fire. Worse, they had taken the Acropolis. This latter information, delivered in person, might have been confirmed by signal relay. The smoke of the buildings would have been visible from the hills of Salamis, and word of it could have been sent down to the city by a prearranged signal, perhaps a flashing of shields.
The result was chaos. Herodotus describes it as a thorubos, a loud, confused noise or confusion more generally. Some of the commanders made a quick exit. They rushed to their ships and ordered the sails hoisted for departure. The rest of the generals stayed at the meeting and passed a motion to fight the Persians at the Isthmus. In either case, the result was the same: Salamis, the last shred of independent Athenian territory, was to be abandoned. The Greeks had panicked, and Xerxes could not have asked for a better result if he had planned it.
The commanders left the conference and returned to their ships. By now it was nighttime, hardly the ordinary hour to board. But the Greeks had a great deal to do if they were to be ready to leave for the Isthmus at dawn—and certainly they were eager to leave as soon as possible. Gear and supplies had to be loaded, equipment had to be tested, and there were always repairs to be made to wooden boats, especially boats as fragile as the trireme. Oars break, ropes snap, sails tear, leather oar-hole covers leak, seats split, and so on. In the fourth century B.C., an Athenian trireme carried a set of thirty spare oars, which is a sign of how common shattered oars were. Normally repairs would all have been made in the sunlight, and no doubt much had been done after Artemisium, but any time spent helping the Athenians evacuate would have taken time from repairing the ships. Now the men would have to make do with the flickering light of portable clay oil lamps.
Themistocles, too, returned to his trireme, which was probably moored in Paloukia Bay. We may imagine that, for the moment, he felt depressed. Even heroes have dark moods when their plans fail, and he surely had given considerable thought to the strategy of fighting at Salamis. At that moment, Mnesiphilus came aboard ship in search of Themistocles. Mnesiphilus was an Athenian politician, apparently an older man and fellow demesman whom Themistocles had looked up to as a young man. Now, Themistocles was the more prominent of the two. But Mnesiphilus was not shy and didn’t fear controversy, as shown by surviving evidence of Athenian attempts to have him ostracized (he sidestepped them, as far as is known). As soon as he found out from Themistocles what had happened at the council to cause the hubbub along the shore, Mnesiphilus gave his advice.
Mnesiphilus told Themistocles bluntly that he had to get Eurybiades to change his mind and to reopen the strategic debate. No doubt Themistocles already knew this, but he needed to hear it from someone else. And Mnesiphilus went further. If the fleet left Salamis, he said, it would give up the act of fighting for a single Greek fatherland. Once the ships left Salamis, every city-state’s unit would look after its own interests and go home. Neither Eurybiades nor anyone else would be able to reunite them. It was an astute argument. It drove a wedge between Eurybiades and the other commanders by playing on Sparta’s smugness. Sure as Eurybiades was of his city’s superior virtue, he would be willing to suspect the worst of others.
In short, Mnesiphilus had made an argument worthy of Themistocles. It was all the impetus Themistocles needed. He did not say a word, although he was thrilled with Mnesiphilus’s reasoning. Instead, Themistocles simply left and immediately headed towards Eurybiades’ flagship. We may imagine him hurrying over the hill between Paloukia Bay and Ambelaki Bay, where the Spartan fleet was probably moored, perhaps drawn up at the quay. When Themistocles reached the Spartan’s trireme, he called for Eurybiades, saying that he wished to speak to him about a matter of common interest. The message was relayed by an aide to the commander in chief, who replied that Themistocles could come on board if he wished. The Athenian, we may imagine, climbed up a wooden ladder and joined Eurybiades on deck. There he sat down beside Eurybiades. They probably sat in the stern, perhaps under a canvas awning, perhaps on folding stools or sitting cross-legged directly on the wood of the deck. They probably spoke by the light of clay oil lamps.
At first glance, Themistocles and Eurybiades made an odd pair. The Athenian typified a society that was brash and free, while Eurybiades’ country was famously slow and sober. Yet Athens and Sparta were both great powers and both enemies of Persia, while Eurybiades and Themistocles were both patriots. Although he lacked a Spartan’s long hair, Themistocles’ bulldog face conveyed a Spartan toughness. And while Themistocles had a quicksilver style, Eurybiades was a pragmatist.
“Of all the men we know,” said an Athenian years later, the Spartans “are most conspicuous in considering what is agreeable honorable, and what is expedient just.” Eurybiades no doubt found it disagreeable to reconvene the council of war, but it would be even more disagreeable to show up at the Isthmus without a united fleet. That would merely confirm his countrymen’s prejudice against sea power. How much better it would be for Eurybiades to have a naval victory to bring home to the Spartans. Eurybiades had learned at Artemisium how much that victory depended on listening to the advice of Themistocles.
Then there was Thermopylae. Rather than give an inch to the enemy, Leonidas had sacrificed his men’s lives and his own. As a Spartan, Eurybiades might cringe at the symbolism of surrender that would come with a withdrawal from Salamis.
In his meeting with Eurybiades, Themistocles repeated Mnesiphilus’s argument without identifying the source. By taking credit for it, Themistocles both glorified himself and avoided the danger that Eurybiades might dismiss a line of reasoning that came from a mere underling. Themistocles then added several arguments of his own. It is not known what he said, but Themistocles must have been able to mix threats and flattery in the right proportion. Eurybiades agreed to reconvene the commanders.
It was probably not unusual for a war council to meet at night, because commanders had their hands full during the day, especially in late September, when daylight hours are rapidly decreasing. It was extraordinary, however, for a council to reconsider a plan that had just been decided. Before anyone could raise a point of order, even before Eurybiades could explain why he had called the council back into session, Themistocles began addressing his colleagues. Then, too, Themistocles was in a state of excitement.
Adimantus, the Corinthian commander, broke in. “At the games, Themistocles, those who start before the signal are beaten with the judge’s stick.” It was a clever insult, at the same time poking fun and threatening violence.
“Yes,” Themistocles replied in his defense, “and those who are left behind do not win the victor’s wreath.”
What followed was an epic contest between the Athenian and the Corinthian. Aegina could have matched Corinth’s disdain for Athens, but it would not support a retreat to the Isthmus, since that would leave Aegina behind Persian lines. So it came down to a battle between two speakers. Herodotus, who knew from Homer the impact of describing a clash of egos, no doubt heightens the tension in his narrative, but even a matter-of-fact account would reveal the drama of the occasion.
As a Spartan, Eurybiades was no stranger to the clash of egos in public. He had seen men compete with every weapon in the Greek rhetorical tool kit: honor, shame, humiliation, wit, pain, threats, and, just beneath a surface of civility, violence—violence that was all the more dangerous because it was controlled.
But in Sparta speeches were mercifully short and sharp: laconic, as the favored form of discourse was called, after Laconia, the geographical name for Sparta’s territory. By comparison, other Greek speakers must have seemed like windbags. There is a report that during this meeting a frustrated Eurybiades lifted up his walking stick and threatened to strike Themistocles.
“Strike but listen,” Themistocles said. The Spartan no doubt appreciated the pithy response; in any case, he lowered his stick and let the man speak.
Having brushed off Adimantus with relative gentleness, Themistocles directed his arguments toward Eurybiades. Here in council he said nothing about the danger of the fleet breaking up if it left Salamis, because that would have amounted to accusing his colleagues of treason to their face—a mortal insult. Instead, he emphasized the relative advantages of fighting at Salamis.
At the Isthmus, said Themistocles, they would have to fight a naval battle “on the wide open sea.” That would hurt the Greeks, because they would be surrounded by the lighter, faster, and more numerous Persian triremes. Even if the Greeks won an engagement, the Persians would come back and whittle down Greek numbers. By contrast, Themistocles continued, his plan set the stage for a naval battle in the narrows, where the Persians could not deploy their full numerical strength.
“Fighting a naval battle in the narrows is good for us, and in the open sea it is good for them” is how he put it in a nutshell. He reminded the generals of the Athenian women and children on Salamis, thereby playing on their emotions. And he insisted that the Persians would not advance to the Peloponnese unless the Greek fleet enticed them there. Finally, Themistocles recalled the oracle that had promised victory at Salamis—no doubt without alluding to the debate in Athens over just what the oracle meant. He closed by reminding his colleagues that the gods help those who help themselves.
Themistocles’ point about the need for heavier ships to fight in the narrows was no small matter. If Athens had purposely built its new triremes to be heavy, then it needed to fight in narrow spaces where there was no room to be outmaneuvered by lighter and faster ships and, preferably, to fight in a moderate wind, which tosses around light ships while barely moving heavy ships. Hence, Themistocles’ insistence on fighting at Salamis. The Salamis straits were narrow and, as will become clear presently, had favorable winds.
Events would prove Themistocles a prophet about a naval battle in the narrows. And he was right about the sea off the Isthmus: it offered nothing like the closed space of the Salamis straits. But Themistocles was wrong about the Persian advance to the Peloponnese, because Persia was ready to head there without any encouragement from the Greeks on Salamis.
Adimantus had the right to be proud of Corinth’s record of fighting for the Greek cause. Since Xerxes had no quarrel with Corinth, the Corinthians might have decided to Medize. Instead, their men fought in every major battle of the war while their women prayed to the gods not to bring the boys home but to let their warriors prevail.
But Adimantus missed the chance to rebut Themistocles’ faulty reasoning. Instead, he insulted him. Adimantus told Themistocles to be silent because he had no fatherland. Then the Corinthian turned to Eurybiades and insisted that Themistocles be denied a vote because he was now a man without a country. Let Themistocles get himself a city before he gave any more advice.
Themistocles now either was furious or pretended to be. He snapped at an Eretrian commander who tried to rebut him, “What are you doing making an argument about war? You people are like squids: all shell and no guts.” Themistocles was referring both to anatomy and numismatics: the squid has both a tough beak and a dagger-shaped internal shell, while Eretria used a symbol of an octopus (closely related to a squid) on its coins.
Adimantus had unintentionally stirred up sympathy for the Athenian by his crude remarks. Themistocles turned the emotion into fear. After abusing both Adimantus and Corinth, he reminded his colleagues that with two hundred triremes fully manned, Athens had a better city than anyone else in the council. In fact, no city in Greece could defend itself against an Athenian attack.
Then he turned to Eurybiades. “If you stay here,” Themistocles said,
you will be a man of courage and honor. If not, you will destroy Greece. For the ships carry the whole weight of the war for us. Mark my words. If you don’t do what I advise, we will put our families aboard ships and convey them to Siris in Italy, which has been ours from of old, and the oracles say that we are bound to establish a colony there.
Themistocles had thrown down his last card. He had threatened to lead Athens into what might be called the Phocaean option: to leave Greece and relocate in southern Italy. Herodotus believes that it was the credibility of this threat that changed Eurybiades’ mind. The Spartan knew that without Athens’s ships, the Greeks could not stand up to the Persian fleet. So Eurybiades gave in.
Apparently Eurybiades had the power to overturn the vote of the council, for that is what he now did. He decided that they would stay at Salamis and fight it out by sea. “They had jousted with words over Salamis,” says Herodotus, and now Eurybiades told the commanders to prepare to fight with their ships. They obeyed, but without the enthusiasm that would have followed had they voted in favor of the decision. The only vote on record called for a retreat to the Isthmus, and it remained to be seen if the other Greeks would continue to abide by their commander in chief’s decree.
It was now dawn somewhere around September 24. Herodotus implies that the council had lasted all night long or at least most of it. There would have been little time for any commander to sleep. The night of drama was followed by a final, daylight shock. About an hour after dawn, at sunrise, an earthquake was felt by land and sea. The Greeks took this as a sign from heaven. The commanders voted to pray to the gods and to call upon the sons—that is, the descendants—of the hero Aeacus to fight at their side. In Greek mythology, those descendants included Ajax and his father, Telamon: it was presumably at the Temple of Ajax in Salamis Town that the Greeks prayed. Unfortunately, the other sons as well as Aeacus himself were represented by temple statues in Aegina, which was about fifteen miles away. The Greeks immediately sent a ship there to bring the statues to their camp.
So the battle of Salamis, the accidental battle, the battle that almost never happened, the battle for Greece to which many of the Greeks had to be brought against their will—the battle was now set to take place. That is, so said the Hellenic League, or at least some of it. The Persians, however, had yet to weigh in. Everything now depended on what they decided to do.