The Battle of Salamis: the sea battle that saved Greece

Salamis is an island very close to Athens. Between the island and the coast of Attica there is a narrow strip of sea, the straits. Here, in September 480 BC, the Greeks fought a great sea battle, a ναυμαχία, against the fleet of the Persian king Xerxes.

The Persians had just won at Thermopylae and burned Athens. Their fleet was much bigger than the Greek one. But the Greek leader Themistocles tricked them into rowing into the straits, where big fleets cannot move easily. In the narrow water the Greek warships, the triremes, rammed the Persian ships one after another. By the evening the Persians had lost. Xerxes soon went back to Asia, and Greece stayed free.

A few years before the battle, the Athenians found a rich vein of silver in their mines at Laurion. Herodotus (7.144) says that Themistocles persuaded them not to share out the money but to build 200 ships. When Xerxes marched on Greece, the oracle of Delphi told the Athenians that a “wooden wall” would save them and called the island “divine Salamis” (7.141). Themistocles explained that the wooden wall meant the ships (7.143).

So the Athenians left their city. Women, children and old people were sent to Troezen, Aegina and Salamis (8.41), and the Persians burned the Acropolis. The allied Greek fleet gathered at Salamis under a Spartan admiral, the ναύαρχος Eurybiades (8.2). Herodotus counts 378 Greek ships (8.48); the poet Aeschylus gives about 310. Ancient writers give Xerxes more than 1,000 ships; many modern historians think the real number was lower, but they do not agree how much.

Many Greek commanders wanted to sail away to defend the Peloponnese. According to Herodotus (8.75), Themistocles secretly sent his servant Sicinnus to the Persians with a false message: the Greeks are afraid and will escape tonight. Xerxes believed it. During the night his ships closed both ends of the straits, and Persian soldiers landed on the islet of Psyttaleia (8.76).

At dawn the Persian crews, tired after a night at the oars, saw the Greek ships coming and heard a battle song. Aeschylus, who wrote about the battle a few years later, gives its words: «ὦ παῖδες Ἑλλήνων, ἴτε», “On, sons of the Greeks!” According to the Athenians, their captain Ameinias rammed the first enemy ship, though the Aeginetans told it differently (8.84). Each trireme had about 170 rowers, the κωπηλάται, and a bronze ram, the ἔμβολον, at the bow. In the narrow water the many Persian ships got in each other’s way, while the Greeks attacked from the sides. Xerxes watched from Mount Aigaleo and had scribes note who fought well (8.90). The historian Diodorus (11.19) says the Greeks lost 40 ships and the Persians more than 200.

After the defeat, Xerxes feared the Greeks would destroy his bridge over the Hellespont, so he returned to Asia (8.97). His army was beaten on land at Plataea in 479 BC. Salamis also changed Athens itself. The rowers were mostly poorer citizens, and because the city now depended on its navy, they gained a stronger voice in the democracy. Athens became a sea power.

In 472 BC Aeschylus put the battle on stage in his tragedy The Persians, one of the oldest Greek plays we still have. Today the same waters are busy again. Ferries, the πορθμεία, cross from Perama to Salamis about every quarter of an hour, and on the island’s north-east coast lies the Navy’s base, the Ναύσταθμος Σαλαμίνας. Every September the island celebrates the victory with a festival, the Σαλαμίνια, which includes a reenactment of the battle at sea.