The situation in 480 BCE
By late summer of 480 BCE, Xerxes’ army had broken through the pass at Thermopylae and entered central Greece. Athens had been evacuated, with much of its population taken to Salamis, Troezen and Aegina, and the city was then occupied and burned. The Greek fleet, gathered from about a dozen or more allied states, lay in the waters between the island of Salamis and the Attic coast. Herodotus is our main source, and the finer points of the battle, including the exact sequence of events and the numbers of ships, are uncertain.
The Peloponnesian commanders wanted to withdraw to the Isthmus of Corinth and defend it, where their army was building a wall. The Athenians, who had no home left to defend, pressed for a fight near Salamis. This disagreement is the background to the battle.
Themistocles and his plan
Themistocles was an Athenian politician who had argued some years earlier that Athens should spend newly found silver from the Laurion silver mines on ships. That decision gave Athens the largest single fleet among the Greeks. Without it, the Greek defence at sea would have been far weaker.
His strategic argument was that the Greeks should fight in the narrow strait. In open water, a bigger fleet could surround and outflank a smaller one; in a confined channel, numbers would count for less. This was the heart of Themistocles naval strategy. Sparta’s Eurybiades held the overall naval command, and Themistocles worked to keep the allied fleet together.
The message to Xerxes
Herodotus tells a well-known story. Themistocles sent a trusted slave, Sicinnus, to Xerxes with a message saying that the Greek commanders were quarrelling and about to flee, and that the Persians should attack at once to catch them. Xerxes, it is said, took the bait and sent his ships into the straits during the night to block the exits.
Whether the message really made a difference is debated. It may be partly Greek storytelling, meant to credit Themistocles with a clever trick. What can be said with more confidence is that the Persian navy did advance into the strait and that the Greeks were ready to fight there.
The ships and the tactics
Both sides used triremes, fast, light warships with three banks of oarsmen, a bronze-sheathed ram at the bow, and a small deck party of marines and archers. The Greek trireme was built for ramming and for manoeuvre, and the oarsmen required long training to row in time. A great deal of the battle was a contest of skill in handling these ships.
Herodotus gives the Greek fleet as 378 ships, though his own list adds up to a slightly different total, and he gives the Persian fleet as well over a thousand. Later scholars generally think the Persian fleet was smaller than that, though still larger than the Greek one. Persian ships were drawn from subjects such as the Phoenicians, whose Phoenician shipbuilding and seamanship were highly regarded, along with Egyptians, Ionian Greeks and Cypriots.
The battle
The fighting began at dawn. The Persian ships had been rowing through the night, and the narrow waters forced them into rows that crowded each other. According to Herodotus, the Greeks began with a brief backing-off, then advanced, ramming ships on the Persian front, while the confusion spread to the rear as ships tried to move forward and others tried to retreat.
The following developments are described in the sources:
- Persian ships collided in the narrow space, and some oar banks were smashed by their own side.
- The Greek ships, fighting in a compact formation, used ramming and boarding to good effect.
- A Greek detachment landed troops on the small island of Psyttaleia, where Persian soldiers had been placed, and killed them.
- Xerxes watched from a throne on the shore, according to Herodotus, which is a vivid image whose accuracy cannot be checked.
By evening, the Persian fleet had lost many ships, and the remainder withdrew to Phaleron. Herodotus gives Persian losses as far higher than Greek, but exact figures are unknown.
Artemisia and other details
Herodotus includes a well-known passage about Artemisia, the ruler of Halicarnassus, who fought on the Persian side. He says Xerxes admired her conduct. Artemisia is one of the few women in the story of the war, and the passage shows how the Greek author saw her. It is difficult to judge how much of the detail is accurate.
Aftermath
After Salamis, Xerxes returned to Asia with part of his army, leaving Mardonius with a picked force to continue the campaign in 479 BCE. The loss of naval control made it difficult to supply or reinforce the army in Greece. The land campaign ended in the following year at Plataea.
For Athens, the victory strengthened a naval identity. The city’s navy, and the rowers who came mostly from the poorer citizens, played an important role in the political life of Athenian democracy in the generations that followed. The battle also helped shape the fifth-century golden age, with its building programmes and cultural flowering, which was funded in part by a naval alliance created after the wars.
What to keep in mind
Salamis is often described as the battle that saved Greece. That is a reasonable summary of how many Greeks saw it, but it is also a summary of a Greek tradition. The war continued after Salamis, and Persian power elsewhere was not seriously weakened. The battle is better seen as a turning point, where the Persian advantage at sea was lost in a single day, than as the end of the war.