The great Persian War and its preliminaries

by G. B. Grundy

Whatever failure overtook the Greek defence at this time of the war was due not to the plan, but to the way in which it was carried out. The design to hold the land force of the enemy at Thermopylæ and his fleet at Artemisium was excellently conceived. It was almost certainly the work of Themistocles. Whether honest or dishonest, he was gifted with that rare genius which enables a man to take in the necessities of a situation vast beyond anything within his experience. The other Greek commanders were men of an ordinary kind, who would in all probability have frittered away the defence in a series of measures such as their limited experience dictated, or, still more probably, have concentrated at the Isthmus, where the strength of the land position would have been more than negatived by the weakness of the position at sea.

Eurybiades, the commander-in-chief, is unfortunate in the setting in which he appears in the history of the time. His must have been an unenviable and difficult part. The diplomacy he had to employ in order to accommodate contending policies would seem to both sides a proof of vacillation. Herodotus’ picture of him is not wholly sympathetic; and yet it makes it quite clear that he was intelligent enough to appreciate the genius of the man who was technically his subordinate, and diplomatic enough to give the advocates of the Northern policy a victory without provoking a fatal outbreak among the advocates of a different design. Nor is this a small tribute to the man’s capacity. The Peloponnesians, and especially the Corinthian opponents of the war-policy of Themistocles, were not people who could be kept in order even by the strong hand of Sparta, unless history draws a very misleading picture of the circumstances within the Peloponnesian league; and the man who captained the Greek defence through the troubles within and without of the year 480 cannot have been lacking in ability, even though he had at his side a pilot of the genius of Themistocles.

The failure to support Leonidas at Thermopylæ utterly changed the strategical conditions on which the design of the defence had been hitherto founded, and the practical surrender of the other defensive lines north of the Isthmus completed the wreck of the plan. The Greek fleet on its return to Salamis found that no effort had been made, and no real intention had existed, to send an army even into Bœotia. It is noteworthy, however, that if the fleet really did suppose that the army was in Bœotia, and was not undeceived on this point until it arrived at Salamis, its commanders made a great mistake in not holding the narrows at Chalkis, and thus preventing the landing of Persian troops in rear of the most eminently defensive passage in Bœotia, that long strip of narrow land between Helicon and Kopais which extended from Chæroneia to Haliartos.

The strategy which was forced upon Themistocles by the state of things which he discovered in existence on his return to the Saronic gulf was the strategy of despair. The position taken up at Salamis could only be justified on the plea that there were no other narrow waters between it and the Isthmus where the Greek fleet could be sheltered from the disadvantage of meeting a more numerous fleet in the open, a large portion of which, the Phœnician, was probably superior to it in manœuvring power. Furthermore, if the Persian commanders took the view that the fleet at Salamis must be defeated before an advance to the Isthmus were attempted, and detained their ships on the Attic coast, then the Persian land army, unaccompanied by the fleet, would be rendered incapable of any sustained attack on the fortifications which the Peloponnesians had erected. SALAMIS. But that “if” was one of terrible significance, and the evidently nervous desire of Themistocles to bring about a battle must have been due to his recognition of the precarious position in which the Greeks would be placed supposing that the Persian fleet did choose to ignore them at Salamis. The most fatal weakness in an altogether dangerous situation was that a large portion of the population of Attica was on Salamis Island, and could not possibly be left to the mercy of the foe. How it came about that the Athenians gave such hostages to fortune, instead of removing them to the coast of Argolis, can only be conjectured. The probability is that the interval between the arrival of the Greek fleet at Salamis and that of the Persian at Phaleron had been too brief to render it possible for the whole Attic population to be transported across the Saronic gulf.

The blunder which led Xerxes to attack the Greeks at Salamis was fatal alike tactically and strategically. He had the game in his own hand, if he could only have recognized the fact; but in his confidence of success with the forces at his disposal, he wished not merely to out-manœuvre but to capture the whole Greek fleet.

The results of Salamis were immediate. The defeat and moral disorganization of the Persian fleet made it incapable of maintaining its position on the west side of the Ægean, though in point of material damage, relative to numbers, it is probable that it had not suffered more severely than the fleet which had been opposed to it. Its departure withdrew, as it were, the keystone of the Persian plan of invasion; and the whole edifice of design fell into ruin which was incapable of repair, though the wreck was not so complete as to render it impossible for Mardonius to make use of the materials in the ensuing year. The blow had fallen on the indispensable half of the invading force; and, bereft of the aid of the fleet, the land army could no longer maintain itself in a country whose natural resources were wholly inadequate to supply its wants.

According to the account followed by Herodotus, Themistocles proposed that the Greek fleet should immediately take the offensive on the Asian coast. The evident confusion of the story as to date renders it difficult to say whether the proposal was a wise one or not. It was, however, rejected by Eurybiades, who up to that time had displayed sound common sense; and if it was really made at the date to which Herodotus attributes it, there can be little doubt that Eurybiades was right. The time for offensive operations had not come; for anything of the nature of a reverse on the Asian coast might have restored once more all the evils of the previous situation in Greece; and it is quite possible that some argument to this effect put forward by Eurybiades has been translated into the form of his answer to Themistocles as given by Herodotus.

The actual design which Mardonius had in his mind when he persuaded Xerxes to leave with him in Thessaly the most effective part of the army of invasion is beyond conjecture at the present day. Possibly he had at the time no very definite plan, but was content to guide, and be guided by, events. His retirement to Thessaly was certainly due to the question of commissariat. The country was infinitely richer than the rest of Greece, and, besides, he had to organize a new line of communications along the North Ægean coast. With this intent, probably, Artabazos accompanied the retreat of Xerxes as far as the Hellespont. The winter gave Mardonius time to form his plans for the next campaign, and though Herodotus does not profess to know what the plans were, the operations during the summer of 479 give something more than a clue as to their nature.

Mardonius seems to have formed a design of two alternatives.

He knew, on the one hand, that unless the Persian fleet could be brought back across the Ægean, an attack on the Isthmus would be hopeless, if not impossible; in other words, the complete subjugation of Greece was out of the question. But so long as the Greek fleet remained as powerful as at that moment, it was also hopeless to expect the return of the Persian; and the first problem he had to solve was how to rob the Greek fleet of its strength.