The great Persian War and its preliminaries

by G. B. Grundy

The main credit for the victory seems to have been adjudged by the verdict of contemporaries to the Athenians and Æginetans. Such, at any rate, is the account of the historian; and the juxtaposition in the roll of fame of these two Hellenic peoples, who were destined to play an antagonistic part in the history of the next twenty years, renders it probable that the verdict of the men of their own time has been faithfully reported. There is little reason to doubt that their contingents were next to one another in the Greek line of battle, and were partners in a brilliant tactical movement against that portion of the Persian fleet which was regarded as most formidable, the Phœnician contingent. Herodotus says that while the Athenians pressed hard on the vessels opposed to them, the Æginetans, presumably on the flank, assailed these vessels of the Persian fleet as they were driven back. It is, perhaps, possible to understand what happened on this wing of the battle. It has been shown that in the course of the advance the Phœnician contingent on the Persian right must have got in front of the rest of the line, a mistake which it would be impossible to correct in a battle fought under circumstances such as those which prevailed at Salamis. Its flank would then be exposed to attack while it was assailed in front, and of this the Æginetans seem to have taken advantage.

It was in the course of this engagement that the Æginetans captured that vessel of the enemy which had a few weeks before captured their own scouting vessel on the Thessalian coast.

THE IONIANS AT SALAMIS.

Meanwhile the battle in the centre and on the Greek right had been of a much more even character. It may even be suspected that in that part the combat was going against the Greeks. The Greek right was indeed in the same disadvantageous position as the Persian right: it had advanced in front of the rest of the line, and thus exposed itself to a flank attack. No details of what actually took place are extant; but it is evident that the Ionian Greeks who opposed the Lacedæmonians and other Greek contingents at this part of the line did not get the worst of it. Herodotus who, as he shows in the account of the Ionian revolt, had a very low opinion of Ionian courage and intelligence, was not in the least likely to praise them unless the praise was notoriously merited. He not merely admits, but says with some emphasis, that they showed no lack of courage and determination in the fight. Any effect which Themistocles’ appeal might have had upon them was certainly not apparent at Salamis. He further remarks that he knows the names of many of their captains who took Greek vessels, of whom he will only mention the two Samians, Theomestor, who was made by the Persians tyrant of Samos for his services, and Phylakos, who was enrolled on the list of the king’s “benefactors,” and given a grant of much land. These significant statements make it clear that in the early part of the battle, at any rate, the Greek right wing had the worst of the fight. More than that, they suggest a very probable reason for the somewhat surprising courage and determination with which these Ionians fought against their kinsmen. Whatever may have been the feelings of the Ionians in general with regard to their countrymen over sea, their leaders were attached to the Persians by strong ties of self-interest, and formed a philo-Medic party in the Greek cities of the Asian coast.

The ruling powers in these cities depended on the support of the Persian government for the maintenance of their position; and from their ranks and from those of their followers, in all probability, the officers, at any rate, of the Ionian contingent were drawn.

The Persian centre also seems to have at first made a stubborn resistance to the onslaught of the Greeks, and for some time after the Phœnicians and Cyprians had been defeated and driven back, the Cilicians, Pamphylians, and Lycians continued to resist, though assailed by the victorious right wing of the Greeks. But the struggle was too unequal to last; and they, too, were obliged to retreat.

It is evident that the wave of victory advanced from left to right along the Greek line, for now the Athenians, probably aided by the Æginetans, though the latter are not actually mentioned by Diodorus, joined in the attack on the right wing of the Persian fleet. The fight cannot have been very prolonged; the Ionian Greeks were obliged to retire; though, if the silence of history is to be taken as evidence, they did not suffer irreparable loss either in the battle or in the retreat. The mere weight of numbers against them rendered further resistance useless.

The battle must have begun somewhere about seven o’clock in the morning, for it was after dawn when the Greek fleet put out from the station it had occupied during the night. It came to an end in the afternoon, after some seven or eight hours’ fighting, it would seem.

It was presumably in this last battle on the Persian left that Artemisia, that queen of Halikarnassos whose praise Herodotus has already sung, performed the remarkable exploit reported by the historian. There is a somewhat grave irony about the way in which he tells the tale, as though, in spite of his admiration for this lady, he were pointing a moral for those who might regard even the bravest of her sex as rather uncertain allies amid the excitement of a pitched battle. When the Persian fleet was already in disorder, evidently towards the close of the fight,[169] an Attic vessel pursued her ship. As she could not extricate herself in any ordinary fashion, owing to her friends being in the way, she stood not on ceremony, but made a way through her friends by purposely sinking a Kalyndian vessel. THE MASSACRE ON PSYTTALEIA. The captain of the Attic ship, unaware that he had a woman to deal with, naturally supposed that he had made a mistake, and had been pursuing a friend instead of a foe, and so allowed the brave but unscrupulous Amazon to escape. He had reason to regret his mistake; for the Athenians, either because they regarded her as a unique acquisition, or her action in commanding a ship against them as a unique piece of impudence, had offered a large reward to any captain who should capture her. Nor, if the whole tale be true, was the Athenian captain the most distinguished victim of the deception caused by her audacity. Xerxes was a spectator of the incident, so Herodotus says, and imagined that the ship she sank was one of the enemy’s vessels. As the rest of his fleet had by this time taken to flight, the incident, by its apparently strong contrast with the bitter circumstances of the moment, called from him the lament, “My men have become women, and my women men.”

It is probable that the Greek pursuit was not carried far, if at all, beyond the channels on either side of Psyttaleia. No information on the subject is given by any of the historians, but the fact that the Persian fleet left the troops on Psyttaleia, some of whom were persons of note, to their fate, indicates that they were not allowed to retire as far as that point unharassed by the victorious Greeks. It may be that each contingent considered it another’s business to rescue these unfortunates, but in any case the two channels must have been in undisputed possession of the Greeks when Aristides carried out what cannot have been the least bloody operation in a battle where the losses on both sides must have been very great. He had, while the battle was in progress, been stationed on what Herodotus calls “the promontory of Salamis,” which would seem to mean that his men had lined the shore of the strait from Salamis town eastward to the extremity of Kynosura, with a view to rendering assistance to such vessels or their crews as might be cast up there during the battle. When the strait was clear of the enemies’ ships, he collected his men, and transported them in boats to Psyttaleia, to attack the Persian garrison of the island. The slaughter must have been grim and great. Only those were spared from whom a heavy ransom might be expected.